I love being able to walk to the coffee shops. This morning was chilly, still in the 30s when I made my way after my morning spins and grocery stop.

My first trip of Indie Bookstore Day yielded a couple of books, a cookie and a cappuccino at Third Place. I’d say it’s a success! I’ll be trying to hit up all the indie shops in town over the next week to complete my passport book.

Just quite pleased with the espresso I made this morning, from Herkimer Coffee. That’s it, that’s the post.

I photo-walked to a neighborhood shop for coffee and breakfast first thing yesterday. It was a beautiful morning to get out for a walk.

A lot of things are kind of garbage right now, but I have this espresso pretty dialed in, and it tastes like graham crackers and dark chocolate. That’s delightful.

My wife got me a special Christmas gift: Espresso class at Anchorhead! This was so fun and educational for me. We started with a tasting exercise and then dug into the mechanics of espresso extraction, and I got to practice on the Big Kid Machine in the lab. I have lots to practice on my own (but not today; I am absolutely blitzed with caffeine). Gifts of neat experiences are the best!

Just a couple of coffee photos. This was a tasty cup.

December 22; the longest night of the year is behind us. I have a warm coffee, I’ve worked out and made myself breakfast, and I’m finished with work for a long rest.

It’s Friday, I’ve had a really good workout, I’m making another coffee and I’m wearing my favorite sweater. Let’s go get it.

🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.

📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.

🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.

I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!

☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.

📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.

🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)

A couple more good things to read this week:

• I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
• Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)

Happy week, gang.