Silver Case

Vacation moving (too) briskly along.  Spent the weekend in Jefferson county, enjoying a very pleasant family reunion, a visit to Seneca Point and the fire tower at Cook Forest, and pizza at the Pizza Pub in Clarion.

Now we’re back in Murrysville.  Went to the Strip District in Pittsburgh today. Bought $300 worth of dried chillies to take back to Singapore.   I bought several pounds each of several different species, including 1.5 lbs of Habaneros and Anchos.  The Habanero are so hot the staff won’t touch them.  I nearly gassed myself and my dad while sticking handfuls of Anchos into a bag. Just the floating dust left me with eyes/nose pouring and coughing and choking.  I can’t get any of these chillis in Singapore, for any money, and they often come up in my recipes (especially things like chipotles).

Went to 21st Street Coffee.  They boast a Synesso espresso machine and a Clover brewed coffee machine.  Sad to say, but despite being the most expensive machines money can buy, the coffee was disappointing.  Ling’s ‘Cortada’ (a piccolo latte in Sydney or a short-double-latte in Singapore) was bitter, as if over-extracted, and the milk was poorly textured — a stiff foam on top of dead (scalded?) milk.  My ristretto was bitter at first, but the final sips were, admittedly, quite sweet.  The drip coffee ( a single-origin Sumatran) was just weak. Disappointing, I was really hoping for a strong cup after having several days of weak, watery coffee.  I guess theoretically I could have told the woman to: 1) make the temperature hotter  2) make it stronger (45 seconds soaking time only?!), but I just assumed she’d make a good, strong coffee to begin with. Sadly, no.

I fixed the situation by going up the street and buying a 2qt french press, a cuisinart burr grinder (wow, it’s really nice, although loud) and a digital scale.  Now we have properly strong, fresh coffee to enjoy.  I can get bags of Peets here, so that is quite satisfactory.

Later in the afternoon I went bike shopping and got myself last year’s (is 2006 “last year” or “two years ago”?) 2006 Specialized Stumpjumper M4 Disc.  It’s a simple hardtail, but I like the feel of it, and thought it would feel good on both trails and road.  I tried some Cannondales, but felt the lighter, quicker one was a bit lame (really wide handlebars made it felt like a kid’s ike) and the heavier, muscular one was just not appropriate for the riding I want to do. It had HUGE fucking wheels and would be good for extremely high speed fire-road descents, as it would absorb a huge amount of abuse. However, I didn’t like how it seemed to handle.   Although this bike has disc brakes, they’re mechanical, not hydraulic, like those awful things on my Trek Liquid 20.

Made a fresh pasta sauce and meatballs for dinner and enjoyed some burrata for appetizer. Dessert was biscotti from the Strip District and the coffee I mentioned earlier.

This evening we played around on ham radio for a while.  Pretty lame conditions, but I did manage a nice, long CW ragchew with WB9EBS, Lee in Dixon Illinois, on 40m.  When 20, 80, and 40 all went dead, I switched to looking for numbers stations, and found a Mossad E10 station on 6mhz (ECHO ZULU INDIA 6.840mhz). That’s the first number station I’ve ever heard in the wild, and I do confess it was exciting to hear.

Now it’s after midnight and I had better go to bed.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.