The northlondonhippy

Archive for May 9th, 2008

You can still win my bub­bler. Go on, take a chance, its not like it costs you anything!

I’ve just fin­ished a mam­moth run of work. I col­lapsed in a heap yes­ter­day and stayed that way for around 12 hours until one of my kit­tens woke me up around 4:30am this morn­ing. Hey ho.

My kit­tens are now 10 months old and the lit­tle boy is already huge. He is going to be a giant, mon­ster cat when he is fully grown. He was the one who woke me this morn­ing, by sit­ting on my chest and star­ing me awake. His lit­tle sis­ter was lay­ing on my legs at the same time, sort of rolling around, also try­ing to get my attention.

And that’s really all they wanted; atten­tion. There was plenty of food and water for them, they didn’t need me for that. They sim­ply required me to pay them atten­tion. That didn’t take very long.

Once up, I had to feed the older cats, a 3 year old and a 16 year old. The 3 year just needed me to pre­tend to feed her, so that she would think it was time for her to eat. Yes, she is slightly neu­rotic, but that’s OK.

The 16 year old, our old­est cat needs tinned food these days, as the dry stuff is a bit too hard for her to chew. She’s nearly com­pletely blind from cataracts, but still gets around the house very well. That’s not true out­side though and as of a cou­ple of days ago, I can no longer let her go out. She went under the fence into my neighbour’s yard and couldn’t find her way back — I had to go and res­cue her and she was car­ried home in my arms. She’s still quite feisty and is doing quite well con­sid­er­ing her age.

After sort­ing out the cats, I parked myself in front of my iMac and did some surf­ing. Between my RSS feeds and sites I visit reg­u­larly, I prob­a­bly vis­ited at least 30 of them before 6am.

I also down­loaded the lat­est episode of Lost. Yes, I know I could wait a few days and catch it on Sky One, but why would I do that? Then I would miss out on all the cool stuff on the inter­net that fol­lows, which is released at the Amer­i­can ABC pace.

I’m really into Lost, I think it is eas­ily one of the best pro­grammes on the box. It’s so com­plex and lay­ered and mostly it does my head in, but I know they are tak­ing it some­where. I am really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the last 2 sea­sons play out, espe­cially as there are only 3 more hours of it left this series, before another ago­nis­ing 10 month wait for more.

I’ve also been watch­ing Mad Men, which I missed when it first aired and was eas­ily down­load­able, but thanks to BBC4, I’ve been able to see the entire series. Wow, its good and Don Draper has got to be the ulti­mate in cap­i­tal­ist anti-heroes. I’ve always liked anti-heroes and secretly like to think I’m one myself. You’re all root­ing for me, even though you know you shouldn’t.

After hang­ing out with the Losties, I made myself my first proper cof­fee of the day with my Vivi. I haven’t used it over a week, because of my erratic work sched­ule and sleep pat­tern, but I haven’t gone with­out excel­lent coffee.

My sec­ondary method of brew­ing fresh cof­fee is now a device called an Aero­Press.

It’s quick and easy to use and it cleans up in sec­onds. What’s not to love?

The cool thing for me about my Aero­Press is that I can use the exact same cof­fee I use in the Vivi, ground the exact same way, so no mess­ing around with the set­ting my grinder. The Aero­Press makes what I would describe as some­thing sim­i­lar to espresso, in strength and vol­ume, but not in tex­ture or com­plex­ity. That’s ok, because the Aero­Press costs sig­nif­i­cantly less than a proper pro-sumer espresso machine.

You can pick up an Aero­Press for as lit­tle as under 20 quid (email me if you want the site sell­ing them that low, they also sell the best freshly roasted beans in the UK) and it will make amaz­ing cof­fee for you too.

By far, the most impor­tant thing you need for mak­ing great cof­fee is freshly roasted, freshly ground beans. When I first started look­ing into cof­fee, this was the most dif­fi­cult thing to get my head around, mainly because of the cost of a decent grinder capa­ble of pro­duc­ing the qual­ity you need for a good espresso machine. Some peo­ple even say the espresso machine is an acces­sory for the grinder and that didn’t really make sense to me until I used my set-up for a while.

An espresso machine basi­cally has an on/off switch; you turn the pump on to force water through the ground cof­fee (at the right pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture) and then you switch it off when you’ve reached the required vol­ume or level of extrac­tion. That’s all the con­trol you really have, on and off. The grinder is what actu­ally gives you any say in how your cof­fee is pro­duced, the coarser the grinder, the faster the pour, the finer the grind, the slower the pour. You aim to pro­duce a dou­ble espresso in around 30 sec­onds, with the colour of the cof­fee stream going tan around that time as well.

Ok, this is tedious to you if you have no inter­est in cof­fee, but as you can prob­a­bly tell, I’ve really got into this in a big way. I’m drink­ing my 2nd cof­fee of the day right now and its every bit as good as my first. Con­sis­tency is what you aim for in mak­ing good cof­fee and I can pretty much repro­duce the same result over and over. That job in Star­bucks is look­ing more and more likely!

It’s just gone 8am, here in north Lon­don, the sun is shin­ing and its expected to be another warm day. I’ve been awake for 3 and 1/2 hours and I’ve pretty much told you every­thing I’ve already done. I’ve replied to a few emails and now I’ve writ­ten this post. You are fully and com­pletely up to date.

All that’s left to do now, is post this on my web­site and you’ll know that’s hap­pened because you’re read­ing it. I’ve got noth­ing left to share with you for now.