Nothing like…

The smell of the house after you roast some coffee. For those of you who do not roast your own coffee, it is an interesting process. Coffee starts out as green beans, kind of a dark olive green. During the early part of the roasting cycle, the scent is similar to fresh cut grass. As the roasting continues, the beans turn yellowish, not bright, but pale and muted, with not much of a change in scent. As it continues, the beans begin to brown, at which point the beans develop a chocolaty and nutty scent. As they continue to roast and become more/darker brown, they take on the scent of brownies cooking in the oven. Then, as they hit the coffee stage as we know it, you get an actual coffee scent.

The aroma is wonderful, the mix of nutty/chocolaty/coffee goodness that lasts for days. And fortunately for me, I do very small batches so every three days or I get to roast more. I feel sorry for the rest of you!

My current batch is some Costa Rican San Marcos that I have from Burman Coffee Traders, where I get all of my coffee. If you roast your own you should check them out. They give a review for their coffees, they have excellent prices, and if you live somewhat close by the shipping can’t be beat!

One Last Reminder…

This Saturday (tomorrow actually) October 24th is the all day class at the Original Root Zen Center up in Racine. The class is being taught by our Master Teachers Tony & Linda Somlai and will run from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. This is actually a somewhat uncommon approach to how classes are done up in the Zen Center, typically, a class like this would be a total of four two-hour classes done one per week for four weeks. I kind of like this format because my mother has wanted to check out some of this Zen stuff, and having to come up from Grayslake, a day trip works much better for her.

Now, of course, the real issue for Saturdays class is brewing. Which coffee to roast and bring to class? So far the Guatemalan has a slight edge over the Indonesian, with the stuff from Panama still sitting on the shelf. Sadly, I can’t wait too much longer for results, as I need to getting it roasting within the hour to give it a minimum set-up time. At least most of the votes thus far are for my favorite coffee of the mix, though one of the Indonesians is very nice and gave me a bit of a surprise.

Image property of Linda Somlai, used and modified with her permission.

The Return to Aikido

Well, after seven long years, I’m finally making my return to the mat. I wish I could have gone last night, but alas, I had a meeting to run, not that it was a bad thing, it was a pretty good meeting last night. But back to the subject at hand. As of Saturday, I will be joining up with the Kenosha Aikikai and be practicing Aikido for the first time in waaaay to long. Not only that, but my sweetie Elaine will be joining me as she starts Aikido for the first time. Poor thing, since she has been with me I have managed to get her into Aikido, Zen Buddhism, and cats. Which reminds me, I have much fur to vacuum up off of the floor…

Elaine is quite excited to taking Aikido with me. I am excited to be getting back into it and having a girlfriend actually joining me in it. That means no nagging about me being off training several times a week. My main concern (other than endurance) is my ukemi skills. The actual techniques I have been practicing in my head all these years, so I think the body will remember the motions pretty quickly. The basic ukemi; forward, back, break-falls, I am not worried about, it’s more the advanced falls from kotegaeshi and shihonage that will take some time to get back. We will find out for sure on Saturday, expect an update sometime after class ;-)

I’ve also managed to get Elaine to sign-up to give her first Dharma Talk at Zen in about a week and a half. That’s right, on Monday, October 19th 2009 at 7:00 PM your are invited to hear her give her first talk at the Original Root Zen Center. I am excited for her, it will be a good learning experience for her. Of course, she insisted that I give one on the following Monday, so I obliged and took the spot. You can also catch me there on Wednesday nights, typically on the bell at 6:30 PM with the Evening Bell Chant to begin the evenings chanting session before meditation at 7:00 PM.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be sure to put something up about Aikido this weekend, Monday at the latest (depending upon how busy this weekend turns out to be). As for now, I’m gonna roast some coffee. I think a nice Full City roast on some Guatemalan Antigua Los Volcanes. Guatemalan Antigua coffees are still my favorite, try some today!!

Opening the Earths Eye Retreat

Got back yesterday from the Zen Retreat up in Sand Bay, WI. Let me just say, this has got to be one of the most difficult retreats anywhere. I mean, look where they had us staying! I mean really, how can anyone expect to relax and get into the retreat mood in a place like this?

But seriously, it was a truly wonderful time. The weather was perfect, low 70’s during the day, mid 50’s for the early morning and evenings. The sunrise over the bay was incredible, probably a good thing that morning bows were kept until after full sunrise to keep us all from staring at the sunrise rather then brining our attention to our bows, chanting, and meditation in the morning.

Saturday afternoon we had a coffee tasting of the four coffees I am preparing for sale at Compassion Fest on Sunday, October 4th. You will want to be there for everything that will be going on, plus you will want to buy a bag of coffee or two. Two regular coffees and two decafs, so there is something for everyone. Just for fun, I will have the ‘Professional’ reviews of the coffees, as well as the ‘Man on the Street’ reviews of them.

It really was a wonderful trip, and the first time for me to attend this retreat. As a result of hearing so many wonderful things about it, I was quite looking forward to go. As a bonus, it also served as my and Elaine’s first vacation together. I for one, can’t think of a better group to share the experience with.

Now back to roasting coffee for next weekend!!

Scattered

Time for a totally scattered post. First off, congrats to my friend @Walker25Film for getting over 1.5 milliWheatons in followers on Twitter. Went to see him earlier in the week to give him a hand with some website development, but I must admit, our html kung-fu is about the same level, so I wasn’t much help. Fun to do the basic layout and get the direction going, plus a cool toy or two.

On the Zen front, the garden is looking very nice. The trellis looks good in its new home, the paths all have at least a small covering of pine needles. All of the Spring flowers are in bloom, the trees have leaves again, all is green once more. I even had the chance to rake the Zen rock garden for the first time. It was nice to get some pointers from Master Teacher Tony on some of the finer points of raking the garden.

It also looks like our guy Paul is finally in his final location in Iraq. He will be spending his tour at the lovely Camp Slayer, which is reputedly quite nice. I’ll have to head over to Zen one of these days for a few extra hours to crank out another dozen or so malas to get out to him. We still have that two or three dozen we made for him a few weeks ago and I would like to get a dozen or so more ready for when we ship him his first care package.

And finally, straddling the border between coffee and Zen, I have been roasting up a special batch of coffees for Janine and Scott to give to one of their sibblings/cousins/relative-of-some-nature for some type of special occasion. This is my first time doing a “special order.” Technically, it was just a request for some fresh roasted coffee for another coffee connoisseur, so I have decided on roasting up some Java and Mocha separately, so they can be sampled individually and then mixed together for the classic Mocha-Java if desired.

I hate to admit it, but I did one batch of the Java a bit longer than I had wanted, so that batch was dumped into my grinder for personal use. I whipped up a small pot earlier in the evening, and let me tell you, that was a damned good cup. If the over-roasted batch was that good, I can only imagine how good the properly roasted stuff will be.

Tomorrow (well, technically later on today now) I will roast several batches of the Mocha for them for delivery on Saturday. By the time they are consumed (assuming they don’t wait a week of course) they should be properly degassed and just at the peak of flavor. Maybe I will steal a scoop or two for myself….

After a couple of long weeks…

First, the bad news was the total crash of the computer that required a reinstall of the OS and all of the Program Files. It was actually a bit more of a pain in the ass than that because I keep the OS, applications, and user files all on separate hard drives, and, well let’s just say that Windows does not make it easy to do that. So reinstalling all of the applications, then making Windows aware, that there are, in fact, files on one of the hard drives, plus the 100+ updates, well, let’s just say it took awhile to get everything close to being done. Still have a few apps to get reinstalled, but everything that is necessary is good to go.

This past weekend was good, had a nice retreat at Zen, and also had the AA tri-county conference. Did the Zen thing on Friday and Sunday and the AA thing on Saturday. I don’t think my head hit the pillow any of those days before 1:00 AM and had to be at the locations by 7:00AM each day. Exhausting, but well worth the effort.

Speaking of effort, we will be making mala’s at Zen this Friday. Jay and I will be there at 2:00PM to start cranking them out, we know that Paul has made a request, so we will have the opportunity to send him some while he is deployed to Iraq for his tour. I’m thinking a nice hematite one for him, maybe with some obsidian, have to give that a bit of thought. The poor boy never got to see any of my mala creations, so he should be in for a treat, I do have the ability to put together some very nice pieces.

Oh, and did I mention that I will be roasting up some coffee for the mala fest? Can't spend all those hours making mala's without some fresh roasted coffee now can we?

Buddha’s Birthday Celebration

Wednesday was fortunate for Doug. Doug is a fairly new guy at Zen and I don’t think he knows about chanting practice at 6:30 PM before the 7:00PM meditation practice. I say he is lucky because this was the first Wednesday of the month, and that means it was teachers meeting night. That leads to me chanting by myself. For those of you who (fortunately) don’t know, my voice sounds like a cat in a blender. We did the hour of meditation practice then went downstairs to help fold newsletters.

Jump forward to Sunday and we had our Buddha’s Birthday celebration. Doug did show up, so it was nice to see a fairly new person show up. The abbot performed his poem, with his brother accompanying him on a drum. One of the funniest things I have heard in quite some time. After that it was downstairs for some grazing.

The community room was pretty full of people laughing, grazing, and sipping coffee, Papua New Guinea in fact. Everyone brought in birthday presents for the Zen Center, so the place is stocked for awhile. Heck, I brought weather stripping for the door. Not good when the door is closed and you can see daylight! Especially in Wisconsin where we had a light snowfall today!

Getting the Calendars Up

OK, testing out the linking and embedding of Google Calendars in a web page. With a bit of luck, the calendars will all populate as they should. After we test them out here and we get the thumbs up, we should be able to get them up on the Zen Centers web site. Personally, with everyone having their calendars on their phones, laptops, iPod's, etc., I think it is useful and helpful to have a standardized digital calendar format for quick and easy checks and updates without forcing everyone to do it manually. After all with dozens of people making dozens of calendar entries, eventually someone is gonna make an entry in the wrong date. At least this way, if the main calendar gets screwed up, everyone will be screwed up together so the event can still go on!!

This morning I finally got a hold of my sister on the phone so I could help her set up her laptop so she could access the wireless router in the house. I sent her an email with all of the stuff I usually have the family load on their computers, so hopefully she will have most of it loaded up by the time I get there for Easter. I think I've talked her into preparing lamb for dinner, now I just have to decide what I will be making. Maybe some type of coconut curry. Humm, lamb, onion, red potato, coconut milk, red or yellow curry over rice....just made that up I did, sounds pretty damn good to me.

On the coffee front, I did screw up a batch of New Guinea Peaberry. Set it on cool too early so it was mostly fruity/herby and the coffee flavors were not well developed at all. Oh well, such things happen upon occasion. Followed that up with some Guatemalan 50/50. That turned out quite nice. I think I like this one just a bit darker than normal.

So after a year....

So a year has come and gone since I last made a post here. Not too much different, still playing poker, though not nearly as much as I was. We lost a critter or two, and gained a couple. I started going to local AA meetings after realizing I had a problem (sober around five months or so). Made my return to Zen a few months ago, didn't realize how much I missed it until I returned. Oh, and I also started roasting my own coffee at home.

So Zen has been good. A couple of people have moved along, but several more new people have appeared. The temple has expanded so we now have an actual community room and a full kitchen. That kitchen makes retreats run much smoother, no more running next door for the food relay.

Also, Tony has a new book coming out on 3/15 with a release party the following Thursday (3/19). The book is titled Peace Vigil: Living Without Hesitation and is going for $19.95. The book also got a nice write-up by the Racine Journal Times. Tony will be talking about the book and how you can use it to help bring peace into your life and to those around you. It will be held at the Original Root Zen Center from 5:30 to 7:30 P.M.

And on that note, I'll be roasting up the coffee the day before so it will be nice and fresh, just for you!! The current plan is to do a Full City Roast on some Guatemalan Antigua, which, in my opinion, is one of the best coffees on the planet. If for no other reason, show up for the coffee and the snacks, they will both be worth your time.

I also just started to use Twitter. So far, so good, let's just hope I can make myself hop on for about 15 minutes a day to throw a few updates per day there. Just the other day I stumbled upon a FireFox add-on called Power Twitter. I love that extension, especially for expanding the tiny url's that most Twitter feeds use. If you Tweet, it's defiantly worth the download.