Coffee

I’ve purchased an automatic, 12 cup coffee maker. It’s the first one I’ve ever owned. I do drink coffee but have used other methods of brewing it. For many years I’ve used a Melita filter basket with Melita filters, No 6. The original Pyrex carafe was broken ages ago and I currently use a Corning ware tea pot with blue corn flowers. I actually started to make coffee with the Melita filters many years ago after Mom and Dad returned from a visit with family in Kentucky. Because they enjoyed the coffee Uncle Ernest had served, they switched from using a percolator to the Melita drip and, I too, began using the Melita filters.

I’m not a coffee connoisseur. I do not know how to make a ‘good’ cup of coffee. My brews range from medium strong to one so diluted only the color suggests coffee. It’s a matter of trial and error because I don’t take coffee making seriously. During the hot days of summer I like iced coffee when I wake up, but when the weather is cold, a mug of hot, steaming coffee is a priority.

One of the nicest morning rituals of morning coffee that I ever enjoyed was while visiting at Mesa Tessa’s in Arizona. Shortly after her rising at 6:00 o’clock every morning, the delicious aroma of hazelnut coffee wafted down the hall and into my bedroom. What fun those early morning chats and gossips were as we filled our mugs a second time.

Once upon a time I enjoyed sipping my morning coffee from a beautiful bone china cup and saucer that my daughter had given me for Christmas, but they have long since been packed away in storage. Currently, I have several favorite mugs; a colorful lady bug mug from the Houston Pyramids my niece, Cindy, gave me, and a Starbucks mug from San Francisco, that Olga, a friend of my daughter’s, gave me during my sojourn in California after the Rita Hurricane.

Coffee is an acquired taste for me. As a child I disliked the odor of brewing coffee but during my adult travels, I became accustomed to an occasional after dinner coffee as I lingered at the table with friends. I didn’t start drinking coffee daily until after I reached the age of thirty. Over the years, there have been long periods when I have stopped drinking coffee altogether. I never suffered a ‘coffee headache’ when I quit, but that’s probably because I was used to drinking a weak brew.

I used to attend the monthly town council meetings where I lived before my move to Houston, Texas. During intermission I’d grab a paper cup and help myself to coffee the council members served. It would be so strong I could only take a few sips, but that was enough to keep me awake until dawn.

Many years ago, Mom developed a taste for coffee ice cream and coffee milk shakes which became family favorites. She often baked cake recipes calling for coffee as one of the ingredients. One of her recipes, from a Dear Abby column, was for a beef roast made with coffee. I made that recipe once. It took five hours and was labor intensive. I was cured from ever making it a second time.

When I traveled through Houston before the Rita Hurricane, the espressos my son made for me were delightful interludes until time for him to drive me to the airport. Now that I live in Houston, I start my day drinking coffee and having IM chats with my son in his apartment in the building next to mine, and my sister, Esther, in Baton Rouge who drinks the kind of coffee served in New Orleans. I’ve never cared for her kind of coffee, but regardless, when she comes to visit, she can use the new coffee maker to brew her coffee and have her morning coffee the way she likes it.

Birthdays

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. As each of my children’s birthdays roll around, I take great delight in those precious memories of them as newborns and the circumstances of their birth. In my thoughts I enjoy tracing their progress from babyhood to childhood to adulthood and count myself truly blessed to have a son and a daughter.

I grew up as the oldest of eight children, five boys and three girls and have always remembered their respective birthdays. On more than one occasion though, I’ve forgotten my own and realized it days later.

I’m looking forward to my sister’s visit in a few days when we will have a small memorial birthday celebration for our mother who passed away at the age of one hundred. Dad was a hundred and one when he passed away. Assuming we have their pioneer genes, we will be celebrating our own birthdays for a few more years!

Occasionally we have read and been amused at horoscopes that flatter and predict great events in our lives. If perchance a fortune in a Chinese cookie agrees with thoughts of our own self esteem, we pretend to believe. My daughter and mother shared the same Zodiac sign, Leo the Lion. Sometimes their horoscopes seem to be right on the button about their personalities and activities and never failed to bring a smile and add fun to their special day.

Golden Fortune Cookie

editors note: MrsBizzyB recently celebrated her 84th birthday... I'd say she has those Pioneer Genes for sure!

Fishing

Last night I took my game character fishing. Some of the game characters have phenomenal success and catch quantities of fish in a short period of time, but my character doesn’t. She always has high hopes though and continues to take the long walk to the lakes in good spirits on the chance that fishing will be better than the last time.

It has been many years since I went fishing, but like my game character, my fishing experiences ended with mixed results. One of my earliest memories of fishing was when I was about 4 years old. My sister and I played in the shallow water at the edge of the lake while Mom and Dad stood in the water fishing a little further from shore. There were large boulders in the water that my sister and I could climb on as we splashed and waded.

When we left the water to sit on the boulders, leeches would be attached to our legs. I was too squeamish to pull them off and whined for Mom or Dad to stop fishing and remove them for me. My sister wasn’t at all perturbed about the leeches and pulled them off her legs without qualms. As I whined and cried, my sister would climb on the rock where I sat and remove the leeches from my legs. I would squeal and scream each time one was stretched into a long, slimy mass before it popped loose. Of course I got back into the water to play again, and each time my sister would remove the leeches.

Vern, one of my brother-in-laws, was an expert at catching big mouth bass. I once had the privilege of fishing in the private lake his family owned in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Many years ago, daughter and several of her cousins piled into my van and we drove across the pastures to the lake for a picnic and an afternoon of fishing. As the afternoon wore on, the children deserted me one by one and hiked back to the house but I continued baiting the hook and tossing the line into the water as far as I could.

With light fading and dusk edging into night, I hadn’t a nibble for my efforts. I had decided to quit when Vern came to see how I was doing. With nary a fish to show, I handed him the pole so he could try his luck while I put the picnic things in the van. On his first cast, he caught what turned out to be the biggest fish I had ever seen! It was a big mouth bass. I had never seen one and was astonished at the size. We ate it for supper that night and had great fun laughing at my fishing failure and Vern’s instant fishing success!

Iziz with Big Fish

Green Jell-O Tomorrow

My son has had minor eye surgery and spent a night in the hospital. He’s back home now but he has to keep ice packs on his eyes for a day or so. He will soon well and back to his normal activities. While he’s recuperating, I take him little care packages of foods and munchies that I make for him such as egg salad spread for mini tortilla rounds, black bean relish, cucumber and tomato salad and strawberry Jell-O.

When I was a child I liked to stir Jell-O after my mother poured the boiling water over the powder. As I moved the spoon back and forth to melt the sugar crystals, the pretty colored fluid made ripples and spirals.

Jell-O was always a favorite dessert as a child. One year I begged to stay up until midnight to see the New Year in but didn’t quite make it. I got too sleepy to stay up so around 11:00 pm I was given some of the midnight party food which included red Jell-O with whipped cream.

As we weathered all the childhood diseases, tapioca and Jell-O was given to us on our bed trays. Sometimes fruit or a combination of vegetables was in the gelatin but no matter the flavor, I loved the jewel like colors.

I followed the same pattern that my mother did when my children were ill; Jell-O was part of their treatment. So I find it quite natural to make Jell-O for my adult son while he’s recuperating.

He gets green Jell-O tomorrow.

Fantasy World

Playing the internet game, A Tale in the Desert (http://www.atitd.com ), can be insidiously absorbing! Role playing is taken to the max! Every activity in the make believe era of ancient Egypt is controlled by time. A fee for membership ($13.95/month) allots internet playing time while the sequencing of mouse clicks for each activity also revolves around time.

Not being accomplished in the art of computer wizardry, there was a lot for me to learn and I was quite frustrated trying to get the hang of playing a computer game. One day I suddenly realized I was actually paying to have myself tortured!

The complexity of the game is almost overwhelming. The ‘how to’ wiki pages (http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3 ) helped me tremendously as did the mentoring from so many other players. There are chat lines in the game to IM other players, privately or publicly. Unlimited telephone service has allowed players to put phones on speakers and converse with each other for hours while playing the game. Players come from many different countries: Belgium, France, Australia, U.S and other parts of the world. Avatar names are used when players contact each other and conversations ensue around game activities as if they were real life. If players know each other in real-life (RL) then they often refer to each other by their avatar names instead of their RL name!

When joining player friends for lunch or dinner in a favorite restaurant, comments about the game dominates the discussion. Difficulties and successes in activities like mining for various ores and having a mine shut down, growing flax in quantity, or how to grow onions, archeological digs, good fishing spots, trading guilds, raising sheep and which trees give the most wood are topics seriously talked about. We mention game icons we’ve noticed as we are out and about the town and then friends in turn give us locations of other interesting ones. If people dining at a nearby table over hear us, they must be quite amused if not perplexed.

Frustration comes in cycles as I try valiantly to move from beginner (growing flax), to the next level (I am now at Level 4) which will let me grow onions. There are serious gamers who know how to use macros (automated programs that repetitively click the mouse for you) and achieve great success in all aspects of the game but regardless of the level achieved, the reward is the same for all of us--- a highly developed skill in mouse clicking. We sit in front of our computers and willingly click so many times per game minute until we log off in either frustration or fatigue. I’m sure the game uses the same technique as the gambling industry: click x number of times for a reward, and then randomly change the frequency of the reward so you will keep clicking like Pavlov’s Dog. It quickly becomes an obsession! The developers of the game are very clever and getting wealthy because of our stupidity but the absurdity of it all doesn’t prevent us from continuing to play.

Iziz with flax