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?