Today, before I left for work, I was treated to the ToS forcefully saying the word “Momma!”
And, yes Amy was holding her at the time.
You talk too much…
Yesterday, the Tot of Steele said what I consider to be her first word… About 1000 times a day, we look at her and say something to the effect of “Hey, little girl!”
So yesterday, I got home and Amy said: “Watch this… HEY!!!” Grace: “HEY!!!” Mimicking mom’s sounds or not, at 4 months and 2 days old THAT WAS A WORD!
You’ll never convince me otherwise.
Wait for it…
So, here we are. One week past our alleged due-date of October 27, and wondering if our child will ever be born. Our sources tell us that no one has been pregnant forever, and we are keen to believe them. However, we do remember one news story a few months ago about a woman in some third world country who had been pregnant for some 40 years. We don’t remember all of the details, mostly because it seems like we’ve been there ourselves by now.
Nathan, Shiver, Robb, and I have set out to do a pheasant hunt. That date, we know for sure. It will be Saturday, December 1 2007, at the Lookout Creek Farm hunting preserve, near Mentone, AL. For the meager cost of $200 per gun, we each get to pot seven cock pheasants. Now, I’ve never seen a pheasant on the hoof or on the plate, but I have read “Danny Champion of the World.” Mr. Dahl was down on the idea of shooting pheasants, and I can tell you why…. This is the description that the pheasant hunting establishment nearest my house game me as an idea of good sport:
…at this time I don’t have a place to do a quality pheasant hunt. I don’t have a place that offers adequate cover for the large birds. Let me suggest something that I think you and your friends would really enjoy. I offer a European pheasant shoot that is great fun. Here is how it works. We need a group of ten people to stand in a large circle here on our property. We then throw 100 pheasant into the air one at a time. It is just like a driven hunt like the Europeans do it. Shooters are 100 yards apart, we rotate every 10 birds to keep things fair for everyone. At the end of the shoot there are usually several missed birds. We will then take the dogs and shooters and hunt the birds on the ground.
Eww. None of us was happy with that idea. Perhaps when we are 90 and much less ambulatory.
Lookout Creek Farm is about two hours from my house. I know this because when it became abundantly clear that Amy wasn’t going to have a baby today, we packed it in, and drove out there. The place is easy to find, and seems quite scenic. As we were in the neighborhood, we took the opportunity to checkout DeSoto Falls and the DeSoto State Park. Both of these were quite nice, but due to the drought, the Falls had been reduced to a small trickle. The canyon they poured into was still quite impressive, and every Alabamian needs to make the trip at least once.
One of the interesting historic tidbits posted on the park’s bulletin board was that the park contains the ruin of what appears to be a fortification built by Welsh explorers circa 1140. This would seem to suggest that the Welsh founded Alabama slightly less than 75 years after the Norman invasion, and about fifty years after founding Cardiff Castle.
The nice thing about having nine months
before your baby is born, is that you have that nine months (presuming you noticed fairly early in the process) to figure out exactly what kind of parent you’re planning to be. Life is unpredictable to be sure, things may change, but we need a good philosophic base from which to start.
We’ve said before that the concept of responsibility involves two parts; One, you stand up and take the consequences when you foul-up and two, do everything in your power not to foul-up in the first place. We think that this principle also applies to parenting. If our child grows up to be a brat or a bum, we are to blame. Therefore it is our responsibility to ensure our child doesn’t become a brat or a bum in the first place.
We offer the following attempt to distill the wisdom we’ve collected over the years into a small proverbia.
- No one owes you anything. Everything that you have is a blessing from God and from your parents. We will provide you what you need to survive, but you must work for that which you want.
- Thou shalt use common sense. This is the ability to look beyond the first step of any situation in order to avoid disaster at step two, three, or twenty-eight hundred. If you can predict disaster somewhere along the line, you should probably avoid all the steps leading up to it.
- Learn from the mistakes of others.
- Thou shalt not live in fear of any man, woman, child, or beast. When we are with you, understand that we are equipped with the knowledge and wisdom to protect you and the physical means to destroy those who would seek to do you harm. When we are not by your side, you must use the tools that we have given you, knowing that when we return, we will exact a heavy price on those who would attempt to harm you.
- Do not seek to provoke any man, woman, child, or beast.
- Never allow any man, woman, child, or beast to cause harm to you or anyone unable to defend themselves. If you can walk away, then walk. If you can’t walk, then run. If you can’t run, then it is honorable to fight.
- Seek excellence in all that you do. Understand that you must win the competition with yourself to succeed.
- Be curious. We are blessed with a big world. Never cease learning about it. Like Kipling’s mongoose, “Run and find out!” We never pretend to know everything, but it is our job to teach you that which you need to know in order to survive and succeed. That is our motivation in all that we teach you. You can trust that what we tell you is true to the best of our knowledge. Other people in this world may have other agendas. Trust, but verify.
- Do not waste your time on people of little worth. This is as true of actors and singers as it is for the brat that calls you names at school. Your time is too precious to involve yourself with them.
- It is good to have friends who are your age, but know that they don’t understand life any more than you do. They may think they do, or act like they do, but they don’t. It is a grown-up world. Enjoy your childhood, but know that one of the goals of growing up is to be able to relate to other adults. Remember that grown-ups can teach you things that you need to know because old people know stuff.
- Be honorable: Thou shalt shoot straight and speak nothing but the truth.
- Respect yourself, and be respectful towards others. Do not keep company with those who do not respect you.
- Choose friends that are worth your loyalty, and be loyal to them. Be a good friend. Sometimes, this means asking an adult for help when your friends get into a bad situation. They may get angry at you for doing that. If they stay angry, they are not worth your loyalty. A friend is someone who cares how your life turns out.
- Be tough. Life is difficult. It is dishonorable to retreat in the face of adversity. There will be adversity. Being tough means that sometimes, you will have to ask for help when you are embarrassed or afraid to do so. Other times, it means that you have to do things on your own that would be easier to ask someone else to do for you. Never give up.
- The value of your life is not measured by your possessions, but rather that which you share.
- Live well. We each are blessed with only one life on this world. Make the most of it. Enjoy time with your family and with your friends. Work hard to succeed, but don’t work too much. Every hour you spend working is one hour you will never get back.
Two Expectant Mommies
Here is a snap of my better half with brother Shannon’s wife, Sojung, taken at Brandon’s wedding. Sojung is due about three weeks before Amy. In fact, the night Shannon emailed me to tell me that Sojung was pregnant, was the night that Amy and I found out. It was hard for me to keep it quiet when I got Shannon’s message, but Amy and I had agreed not to tell anyone until we went to the doctor.
Here are the other few pictures I took at Brandon’s wedding reception.
Well Wishes
Our best wishes go out to Nathan, our man in Mobile, who has just been drawn for a Colorado cow elk this September. This time, he will be limited by license to muzzle-loaders only. We have hinted that the proper equipment for this enterprise should be one of the fine reproductions of the Pattern 1853 Enfield, though we will admit that the 1861 Springfield rifles are nice too. Either are preferred to any of the more modern muzzle-loading rifles that will develop absolutely no trace of character or style for at least the next 150 years.
In any case, muzzle-loader or center-fire, if Nathan sees a cow elk in September, it will be in his pot by November.
The Tot of Steele
As most readers are already aware, Amy is about thirteen weeks pregnant with our first child, hereafter referred to as the “Tot of Steele.” We don’t yet know the child’s sex, but we are sure that even at this point it is a child. We’ve seen heart-beat, head, fingers, toes, etc in the sonogram images. The mind boggles and the heart humbles as new parents marvel at the first life signs of their newly formed child. Such an experience surely must be incompatible with a world in which abortion exists. Nevertheless, as the atrocity at Virginia Tech has shown us, evil still slithers among us.
Most every one that Amy has talked to is predicting that the Tot of Steele will turn out to be a girl. I knew that Amy was pregnant before she told me, and by that same clairvoyance, my money is that it will be a boy. Regardless, we just pray that our little miracle is happy and healthy. Neither of us care which our baby turns out to be, though Amy likes to point out that girls get to wear “cuter” clothes. I’ve had to remind her that our expected child is neither a doll, nor a stuffed-animal. I’ve forbidden her to dress our child in any clothing that has ears or a tail sewn-on, except in the event of Halloween.
Talking of which, the Tot of Steele is due near Halloween on the 27th of October, 2007, some 149 years to-the-day after our hero of San Juan HIll, Theodore Roosevelt. This portends well for our child, but I’m afraid it will mean a rough ride for my loving wife, when the time comes.
Let it never be said that we do not look after the little darling, even before birth. Last weekend, we purchased the child’s first set of books: “Scuffy the Tug Boat” and “The Poky Little Puppy,” two of my childhood favorites.
We’ve seen several bedding sets that we like, for both little boys and little girls. Soon as we know for sure, we’ll rush out and pick-up the appropriate set. I have been somewhat amused and annoyed at the fact that all of the children’s clothing and bedding that features a “wild animal” motif, never displays the any of the animals as having teeth. Is it really fitting to teach children that Rhinoceroses and Crocodiles are cuddly? If we were on a different continent, this could have great potential for tragedy! If you don’t know what I mean, you should immediately rush out, and purchase a copy of Peter Hathaway Capstick’s “Death in the Long Grass.”
It’s Alive!!!
Last week, Amy and I discovered that we have a new Steele on the way!!!
Today we went to her first prenatal doctor’s visit, and got to see our baby’s heart beating. It is amazing to me that anyone can see an ultrasound like that, and still be “pro choice.”
Noteable news…
Several interesting developments lately…
1. In mid-November, I’ll be changing jobs. Working in the same building, for the same company, just in a different capacity.
2. Saturday, Amy and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary.
3. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on draft in Alabama!
4. Fuller’s ESB reappears in TN… Albeit in smaller 11.2 oz (330 ml) bottles. 330’s are popular in Europe, but they make me mad. Still, I’m glad to have been able to lay in a small supply. There are no hops but fuggles. And Fuller’s ESB is their prophet.
Busy Weekend
It has been a fairly productive weekend. Amy and I did a good deal of much-needed house work, but we got that done pretty quickly. Amy had some Mary-Kay seller come out to the house to do some sort of something.
I took this as an opportunity to run off to Swan Creek Shooting Range for some trigger-time. I put 200 rounds of .45 ACP down-range, and turned my target, a cardboard box with one of those fluorescent targets taped to it, into swiss cheese at about 18-20 yards. The target told a story, and the story was this: “I may not be able to shoot very well, but a have a lot of ammo.”
I had quite a lot ( 8 – 10? ) fail-to-feed-last-round stoppages with both the Kimber and Wilson Combat magazines. The bullets were getting pinned nose-up to the top of the chamber. It seems like it may have stopped during the last 50 rounds or so. That makes a total of 600 rounds through the Kimber. Hopefully it is “broken-in” now, and I won’t see any more.
Grabbed some coffee at Starbucks in Athens on the way. A cup of Italian and a pound of Arabian Mocha Sanai. I really like Yemeni Mokka coffees. No “blends” for me, thank you! I made a pot of it today. The beans were quite oily, and the cup was excellent even out of my cheap auto-drip brewer.
Stopped by and visited my uncle and his family on the way home. I rarely get to see them, but as I was passing by their house on my way home, and they were outside, it would have been rude not to.
Amy and I watched two terrible films. “Jackie Chan is the Prisoner” and “Flash Gordon.” Both of them were absolute stinkers.
We also rented a 10′x10′ storage room to move some of Amy’s school stuff into. We relocated a truck load of boxes from our garage, which will help my state of mind tremendously.
Right now, I’m trying out Fedora Core 5 on a laptop. I’m just curious to see what they’ve changed with this rev. I’ll be happy when either Solaris 10 becomes really useful as a desktop OS (I doubt this will ever happen) or I can get OS X that runs on a Dell.
Today was the first day in two weeks that I’ve been out of bed after 6:00 AM. I slept-in until 8:30. Tomorrow, it is back to 5:30 AM.
Right now, I’m off to read some Heinlein.
So charismatic/With an automatic!
Notice that my soon-to-be-well-trained wife has her index finger off of the trigger until she is ready to fire.
And YES! She is wearing ear plugs! You can’t see them well because this picture was snapped with a camera-phone.
Travelogue
May 8-12 Newark, California: SunUP Network Forum
Tuesday
Set the clock for 06:30. Then 06:45. Then 06:50. Amy called 06:46. Got
up. At least I didn’t have to iron anything.
Got the shuttle-bus to Sun’s Menlo Park campus. Like everything here, it was
beautiful. Nice view of the bay and of the mountains. Nice green trees. Just
like everything here.
Signed in with about 50 or 40 other people. They had packets
on the table with everyone’s names on them. When you got your
packet, they handed out Mikasa crystal wine stoppers in the shape
of grapes. This is wine country, I suppose, but that was the
strangest schwag I’ve gotten since EMC handed out toe nail clippers
in 1999. Once you got in the door, they had a table full of
circa-1999 Sun Blueprints books for grabs. I snagged 6 different
ones. A nice addition to the book shelf, but they are all hopelessly
out-of-date and mostly useless.
This was a long freaking day. We started at 08:30 PDT, and didn’t really
stop until 18:30 PDT. By about 15:45, I was ready to start throwing things.
Really, people. If you have this much junk to cover, make it a three day
conference!
As a result of the long time sitting, I began to think of ways Sun annoys me.
- Solaris excluded, Sun isn’t any good at making software. They have a
lot of tools that are either half-finished, half-useful, half-tested, or
half-assed in some other way I haven’t listed yet. Worse than that, they
have a lot of products with overlapping functionality, and don’t really seem
to understand the concept of code reusability. I really wish they’d get
their act together, particularly with systems management software. They
spent probably three hours out of the day, showing off several new offerings
that they were really proud of, but were nothing more than an extension of
the current mess they have (or in a couple of cases, completely new
messes. One dude told us about this new program going by the moniker SMC. I
don’t remember what SMC stands for in this case because Sun already has
at least three other products called SMC. - Product names. Is it Netscape Directory Server? Or maybe iPlanet. Or
maybe SunOne. Uh… how about Java Directory Server? Sun Management Center
(SunMC, not to be confused with Solaris Management Console: SMC) apparently
used to be called Symon. Netconnect is now being renamed into two different
products (that only half-work at this point). PLEASE stop renaming things.
Or at very least, remove all of the old names from the documentation. - Java AWT(Abstract Window Toolkit)/Swing. It is old.
It is slow. It looks like it has been beaten with an ugly
stick. When most people say “Java sucks!” they are talking
about AWT/Swing applications. For some reason, Sun has
chosen to make all of their systems management applications
with Swing, rather than native tools using C and probably
GTK (since they are now shipping Gnome). These apps look
like they were written in 1989. They are way too slow to
be useful to anyone. They only work half the time. If you
need to update the Java Virtual Machine on your box, they
probably won’t work at all. If you need to run them over
a remote X-Windows session, the best thing to do is forget
it. Curiously enough, Sun are not the only guilty party
here. Veritas has recently perpetrated this with their
NetBackup admin client. I think that Apple did it right
by providing a Java interface into Aqua. As a result, you
can write Java apps that at least look like native
applications, though they may not always behave like
native apps. From what few I’ve seen, they actually perform like native
apps too. What Sun should to is to hire some GUI designers from Cupertino
to work on a replacement for Swing (which was a replacement for the AWT), or
just freaking license the Java + Aqua layers. Yeah, right. I know that UNIX is predominately a text-oriented system. I am
fine with that. However, if you’re going to provide GUI tools and force us to use them for some tasks, PLEASE make them
useable.In a lot of ways, I think that Apple has ruined things for other UNIX vendors, by proving that UNIX can look good and be functional.
- Could you guys please make better LDAP server and client configuration
tools?! This is one thing Microsoft has got right. It is really easy to
configure a secured Active Directory server, and connect clients to it,
without ever passing clear text passwords over the wire. Replication to
redundant servers is apparently not very difficult either. They have had
this working well enough since NT 4.0, and you haven’t. Period. If system administrators can manage to figure out exactly what documentation they need for the Directory Server, it is possible
to get an LDAP server running, with clients authenticating to it in
probably about 48 hours if you’ve never done it before. Now try adding TLS.
Good-freaking-luck. We don’t need to go dinking around with ten different
tools for creating self-signed certificates, etc. You should assume that:- We need Transaction Layer Security by default. These days, it is
NOT acceptable to pass clear-text passwords over the wire, unless I
specifically tell you to. - Unless I tell you differently, self-signed certificates are OK. Ask
me if I have a “Real” cert, and if not, CREATE A FREAKING CERTIFICATE
AUTHORITY. Make the admin tools smart enough to push the proper trusts
out to the clients when I initialize them. Instructions for working
with self-signed certificates that say things like: “Open the Netscape
Web Browser” are NOT ACCEPTIBLE. This needs to be automated, easy, and
above all needs to “just work.” - pam_ldap needs to be smart enough to allow RSA key authentication
for password-less logins over SSH. You might be able to talk me out of
that one. It would at least be nice if a system administrator could
allow that for specific accounts. - Kerberos integration should be documented and as easy to implement as it is on Windows (nearly invisible).
In other words right now, the Directory Server that ships with Solaris is just a tool. Sun needs to evolve a little bit by providing the tool integrated with the design, configuration, and deployment tools to make it useful quickly.
- We need Transaction Layer Security by default. These days, it is
- Jumpstart needs to be updated to be smart enough to
use DHCP. There NO excuse for this. And “Go download JET” isn’t a good answer either, unless Jet both grows up and gets shipped with the OS. Again, this needs to be automated, easy, and just work. We have to use this tool often, and have committed significant time into customizing it for our environment. We shouldn’t have to dance around RARP any more, since DHCP has been the
standard for at LEAST 10 years.
The patch management discussion nearly drove me over a cliff. They are
trying to make better tools, but it looks like they are worse and that
is really a shame. I can’t imagine that people are going to want to use
these tools unless something dramatic happens. If Sun are planning to charge for these tools, I will laugh.
The most interesting quote of the day was “You cannot manage
availability. Availability is a result.” That is simple, but quite
profound, and I’m glad they are thinking along those lines. Also
interesting is the statistic they gave of the % chance of a system
administrator inadvertently causing an unplanned outage: 1 in 200. So,
every time I log into a machine, I have a .5% chance of causing down time
such as accidentally rebooting production instead of a development machine,
etc. Excellent.
Over all, I left the first day of the conference a LOT more agitated than
when I went in. Hopefully I will get some opportunity to provide input
(read vent) about some of these things tomorrow.
We did get a chance to tour the iForce center today. That was pretty
neat, but I already have an E25k, and they could have done the tour in 20
minutes instead of more than an hour. It got old fast.
I skipped the free dinner, in favor of going to the Apple
Store in Palo Alto. It wasn’t worth the time. I was very
disappointed in it, as the Mac Resource in Huntsville is
way better than this place. Ate at PF Chang’s in Palo Alto.
Had the Orange Peel Shrimp and a Fat Tire.
All I ask of life is a plate of shrimp(or maybe oysters) and enough Fat Tire
to choke a goat. Maybe one day, New Belgium will expand
enough to be able to ship to Alabama. For that matter,
maybe one day Alabama will change their beer laws to make
that worthwhile.
Got Amy a present, then headed back to the hotel.
Travelogue
March 24-27 Grand Rivers, KY
It has been a while, but I thought that I would write about it anyway. March the 24-27, Amy and I took a short and much-needed weekend trip to Kentucky with Brandon and Miranda. It couldn’t have been a better trip. We got a cottage on Kentucky Lake, at a place called Lighthouse Landing. LL is in Grand Rivers, KY, and is located at the north border of the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. This is really the first time Amy and I have taken a weekend off to go anywhere other than Mobile since we moved to Huntsville.
LBL is a great place to go. The park is huge. It took us over an hour to drive through the length of it. We got to see many different types of wild animals… Bison, elk, deer, turkeys, skunks… All I can say is that Bison are freaking huge. The first one I saw was from a distance, and I just thought he was a particularly hilly part of the terrain. I was quite surprised to see this hill stand up and walk around.
We left from our house on Thursday morning, drove to Nashville, then got onto I-24. About 6 miles from the TN/KY border, Brandon called back and wanted to stop for an early lunch. He saw a Subway sign, and headed for it. When we got to the Subway, it turned out to be one of those Subway-in-a-gas-station thinggies that I typically distrust. In the process of ordering, we worked-out that some weeks previous, this particular deli had severed all afflilation with Subway. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the worst meal of the trip. Fortunately, no one got sick.
We got to Lighthouse Landing about 3 hours and 20 minutes after leaving home. The place is sort of 3/4 marina with %25 cottages and RV campground attached. The weather was still just a little too cold
for most people at that point. Which means that it was perfect for me, and had the side-effect of keeping most of the people away. We also got a good discount on the cottage.
The cottage was about the same as staying in a fully furnished extended-stay hotels. The kitchen came fully equiped. Stove. Microwave. Toaster. Coffee Maker. Freaking dish washer. There was some wicker furniture, a table, a bedroom, and a bathroom on the bottom floor. The top floor had a bedroom and a foyer with a pull-out couch. You could have easily had 6 people stay here without too much stepping on of toes. Most importantly, there was a very nice Weber “One Touch” grill outside, which we used regularly.
The first thing Amy wanted to do was to go check out the Bison. So, we did, and killed most of the afternoon driving around the park, checking things out. Brandon and Miranda took their bikes out for a ride instead. We met back at basecamp at about 4, then drove to Paducah, KY for food, since none of us had packed any. We ended up eating at Applebees for some reason. After that, we hit up the Wal-Mart for things to grill over the next couple of days. Left Wal-Mart, and went on a beer hunt. Selection was rather limited, but they DID have Chimay White, so I can’t call it a bust. I got a bottle of the Chimay, Brandon got one too, plus a couple of Sam Smiths (one IPA, one other I don’t remember).
Later that night, we fired up the grill. We ate brats, and drank good beer (including my brown ale and abbey ale) from metal camping cups I had brought. Man, it was great. The weather was cold enough to keep those metal cups and the beer in them cold and quaffable. Perhaps I’ll have people harass me about wasting Chimay white with brats around the grill. All I can say is that it was damn good beer, and I’ll probably never forget the experience. The only problem is that we drank it all up the first night.
Friday we went horse-back riding. I hate horse-back riding. There is something about the smell of horse crap and hay that I find… disgusting. It cost way too much money, and the horses… well just put it this way, if the horses had been donkeys, you would have described them as “sad assed.” They had been taken care of, but were just really old and slow. I took great delight in making mine walk through the mud when ever he tried to walk around it and pin me against a tree. Fortunately, the saddles were western, not English… so I didn’t fall off.
More grilling Friday night. Dry county. No beer run. I really liked that Weber grill. I think I’m going to buy one. I actually managed to get grill marks. Excellent.
Brandon and Miranda left Saturday morning because they had peeps coming into town for Easter (maybe peeps wasn’t the best choice of words). Amy and I went back to Paducah because she wanted to go the big fabric store. We got there only about 20 minutes before they closed, but she wasn’t disappointed. The place was huge, and her eyes lit up as we walked in. I wish we would have had longer to stay there. It was painful for me, but she was digging it the same way I dig poking around a record store for hours.
Did more beer hunting in Paducah. Jackpot. Found this place called “Proof Brothers.” Too bad Brandon had left already. Came back with many beers, including but not limited to:
- Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (INCREDIBLE! Scored a 97 in the latest “All About Beer” Magazine I had seen before going)
- Anchor Brewery Old Foghorn
- Unibrou Terrible
- Bellhaven Wee Heavy (Very good too)
- Scotch de Silly
- Ommengang Three Philosophers
- Fuller’s Vintage Ale (Looking forward to this one. Only 90,000 were bottled. Mine is #66000-something )
- Stone Brewery 8th Anniversary Ale
- A four pack of historic beers from Scottland, including “Alba — Scotch Pine Ale”
They had many more, and I could have spent HOURS and thousands of dollars there. Fortunately restraint prevailed.
After that, we drove across a very scary bridge over the Ohio River into Illinois over US Hwy. 45. We ended up in a place called “Metropolis.” They had posters and statues of Superman everywhere. Truth be told, the place was more like Smallville than Metropolis. It was entertaining for about 2 minutes.
Easter Sunday. Packed-kit and headed home. Took about an hour and a half longer because we drove down through the park. Did I mention that place is huge? I think we’ll probably go back in October. I’m already saving my pennies for the next beer hunt.
Yeah, I'll have a cuppa. . .
I’ve been roasting up some Yemen Mokha Mattari – Muslott coffee beans lately. Sweet Marias got these in November of 2004, and I’m glad I got some because they appear to be all sold out of it. That is a shame because I’m finding them so good. Note that in this case, the word “Mokha” is a place-name for where the
coffee came from, and has nothing to do with the mixture of coffee and chocolate, called mocha. I bought it with some Java Government Estate – Blawan, to make (you guessed it) a Mokha-Java blend. I’ve been
experimenting with it a bit, mostly by roasting a 50-50 blend to various degrees.
One thing that I noticed is that by roasting them together, I got a very uneven roast. The Javas turned out less roasted than the Mokha. This warranted more experimentation.
There’s a guy at work that really likes dark roasts (read Starbucks). I didn’t want to ruin any good beans, so I weighed out 64 grams of a Columbian Supremo (to me, table coffee, nothing special). Fired up the roaster,
and cooked those suckers for 12 minutes. First crack came and went. Then second crack. After about 8 minutes, there were apparently some beans that never got to first crack that finally went… Loudly. They
hit second crack a minute later. Finally, when the garage was full of a ridiculous amount of smoke, I stopped the roast. If he gets any flavor besides charcoal from these, I thought, I’ll be amazed. He wanted to try home roasted, and I was keen to oblige. It turned out that he really liked them. He correctly identified them as South American, though he guessed Brazil. He said that the South Americans were his least favorite, but that seeing that it was possible to produce a good cup, he was going to buy a roaster. That will give me some
one to trade with.
So, before I went to bed that night, I went into the garage with 64 grams of the Mokha. I roasted it until I could not see for the smoke in the garage. That was probably the best cup I have roasted. It tasted
great. Not too bitter, good roast flavor, and packed a PUNCH. I gave a cup to Chris when I walked in at 8:30. I had a 9:00 – 9:30 meeting. When I came back, he was bouncing off the walls. He drinks coffee
pretty much every day. I don’t, and I’d had about 3 cups. Whew. Got to try that again, as it managed to keep me awake and attentive through some very dull meetings that day.
Tried the same thing with the Javas the next day. Not quite as good. Definitely not the same punch.
My grandmother came to town last weekend with my mom, my sister, and my sister’s three kids. I’d roasted some decaf Sumatra water-process decafs, in case anyone wanted a coffee after dinner. My grandmother told me after dinner that she’d smelled it in the garage, and that it was too bad coffee didn’t taste like it smelled. She said that the smell had brought her back to childhood when her mother used to roast ina cast iron dutch oven on the back porch. That made it all worth it to me. Because smell is tied so closely to memory, I was able to bring out something that she had probably not thought about in 40 years. It gave her a memory she probably wouldn’t have thought of for the rest of her life. That’s just pretty cool to me.
