Context

Woke up from a deep sleep to sound of snowblowers and scoops. Nor’easter in progress, intense pre-dawn blizzard. Branches, twigs coated in snow. Window screens caked in white. Hard gusts blowing snow off the distant rooftops. Inside, the kitchen is warm. NPR is on. Shared a square of dark chocolate moment with 🦄.

Groundsniff

a forest, like an enchanted forest, like a dark green color, an ecosystem of complex notes — 🦄

Took the grounds to the corner of the room to sniff. Subtle and layered. It does not hit as bluntly as Mocha Java.

Brew Notes

Measured 16.0 g beans and yielded 16.0 g grounds on scale with roughly 0.1 g in grinder catchment. Why? This Maestri house can display tenths of a gram but its sensitivity is likely something like +/- 0.05 g. Final brew water landed at 255.8 g. Switch release at 2:34, about four seconds later than planned. No extra agitation and no structural process changes from yesterday.

Normal Techniques

• RDT: three spritzes and four shakes of the beans. It’s become a standard.
• Two blooms: 1.) to 200 g, 2.) remainder.

Brew Ring

Spent bed again formed a defined dark outer ring, then a lighter ring where paper shows through, with grounds sloping inward to a central mound. Not flat. Looking down at the way the grounds slope in towards the bottom of the cone and then up to its little pitcher’s mound, something about the ridges evokes desert mountain ranges. Maybe these grounds are nostalgic for their mountain birthplace. But the description of their farm was characterized by flatness.

Something notable about this farm is its topography. It is a practically flat farm with very young nearly 100% Pacamara trees. — Description of finca los angeles

Presence

Tasting Music

Today’s tasting is accompanied by the simplicity, graceful lines, and hooks that Alfred Brendel carves when playing Haydn. It’s like skiing. Fingers still know this one, its ticklish swiftness. Need to dig the sheet music out.

Tasting, Writing

Yesterday my attention was rapt around the sparkles and aftertastes of this new coffee. Today it is a gentler, simpler experience. Thinking about only having one cup today. Maybe experiences should be dense and sparse.

Re-watching the LOTR series, thinking about AI as a “precious” object that upends the world.

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” — Bilbo, in Bag End. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Here he’s describing what long possession of the Ring has done to him - not physical aging, but a kind of spiritual thinning and depletion. In a similar way, ingesting too much information at a cursory level leads to a diluted mind, not concentrated mind.

Vimmery

In tmux today, writing in vim. Feels good to be home. Needed a reminder that gj and gk were the keyshorts for moving up and down a “visual” line, and w and b are for navigating by word forwards and backwards.

Got a bit confused after splitting the window with a vim pane rather than a tmux pane, and then using tmux keybindings for navigating panes rather than vim panes. Need to update muscle memory; probably makes more sense to prioritize tmux now.

[ cup/1 · weather/noreaster · listening/npr · listening/piano ]

:wq