People Move Away and Time Flows On

People move away

I’m having coffee with a friend today. She will be moving to Arizona soon to enjoy her retirement in new surroundings. I don’t blame her; this is not a good town to retire in.

Coffee morning concept, coffee cup with small dish putting on old plank together with stack of notebook over forest outside as background.

We haven’t seen each other in the longest time because of COVID, but we’ve corresponded online in that somewhat indirect way allowed by Facebook. She participates in community band and runs marathons. I, on the other hand, write and self-publish, hoping to get some of my work traditionally published.

Our coffee date will no doubt be a way to catch up and, in a way, to get closure even with Facebook as a medium of exchange. She is embarking on an adventure.

Time flows on without me

I admit I’m jealous of my friend. I have been caught in gaffa (as in the Kate Bush song) for so long, with my writing, my adventures only in books. I used to ask God, “What am I called to do?” but got no tingling that told me what direction to go. I’m not getting too much excitement from writing these days. Nothing is calling me on a quest. No serendipity calls my name, and when I think it does, it falls flat.

I have spoken about this before. I don’t know if this anhedonia is something normal people feel, or if I’m just comparing this pale mood with the elations and depressions I felt before I was diagnosed with bipolar II.

But I’m looking for a quest, a re-energization within COVID, a pleasant surprise, a story to tell as I tell my friend goodbye.

Waking Myself Up

On the stereo: Funk Essentials

It’s 6:30 AM (or ‘six AM in the morning’ as they say around here). I’ve been up since 5 but not quite awake.

Sometimes, in the mornings, I just have to turn the music up to 11. Today, it’s the Funk Essentials playlist from iTunes. The coffee hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m awake enough to get my mind typing. James Brown’s ‘The Payback’ is playing right now, and I suspect that the never-ending loop of ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ stuck in my husband’s head has been derailed. Let’s hear it for the downbeat!

In the cup: Zambian coffee

The coffee’s just about ready. The coffee du jour is the bottom of the Zambian beans we got at the local cafe. It’s an interesting coffee with notes of bitter chocolate and something berry.

On the docket: Trying to motivate

The problem with writing so close to the beginning of school is that I want to soak up every drop of leisure I have left — and I have less than a week of it. I’m not that enamored of what I’ve started right now, and I have Canva advertising to play with. Ideally, I should get two hours writing today. Or even an hour. And it’s not speaking to me.

Maybe I need motivation.

Or a vacation.

Coffee

Just a Little Test

So I’m getting tested at the doctor’s today, and I can’t have the following:

Breakfast
Coffee, tea, etc
Anything else that has caffeine, calories, etc.

Help!

Waiting

Summer is a fine time for waiting

I always feel like summer is the time for waiting. Ordinary time in the church calendar, the hot days fading into each other under the relentless sun, the school year in the distance and nothing at the moment needing done. Time to relax and wait.

If only I was better at waiting

I an very poor at waiting.

This is the current season of my life, where I am waiting for many things — my beta readers to get back to me, answers to queries and submissions. I’m waiting for some feedback. Where to go from here. How to go forward. I want to go forward, not just sit here and wait. What am I called to do? Nothing, at the moment, and I hate it.

Waiting in this moment

At this moment, I am waiting in the Westport Coffee House in Kansas City. I am supposed to be writing, and I am writing this but getting very agitated with the notion of waiting.

I need to find a way to be comfortable with waiting.

Coffee as a Family Ritual

The formative coffee experiences

I dated a guy (to the point that we later got divorced) whose family had a Sunday ritual of strong Gevalia coffee in white Scandinavian porcelain ware, classical music, and the New York Times.

Another boyfriend’s family ritual involved percolator coffee in the cluttered kitchen as the cats drank out of the sink, and his stepfather and I discussed socialism.

My own family would drink coffee out of mismatched mugs in the kitchen on Mom’s good days, and the cats would wander around the table and occasionally stretch up on Dad’s legs. We would plan dinner, which often consisted of tearing apart a recipe and reassembling it again.

Coffee has always been a ritual

Throughout time and place, coffee has been featured in ritual. The Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which involves roasting and grinding the beans at the table; the coffee breaks in an office offering time to talk with colleagues; weekly coffee dates. After-dinner coffee, sometimes spiked with liqueurs. Turkish coffeehouses and coffeehouses in Paris.

There’s something special about the coffee beanthat lends itself to special moments. (I know the same could be said for tea in the British world, but I’ve only had a proper British tea once.) We in the US have very few rituals, but the ones we do have are ingrained and almost impossible to separate from everyday life.

Our Sunday ritual

Right now I sit in the living room typing this with a cup of coffee listening to classical music. The cats are somewhere — they don’t like classical as much as we do. The music du jour is one of Bach’s kids. We have a faux fireplace, which is on for ambience even though it’s summer (don’t ask; it’s a husband thing).

Soon I’ll be working on writing and Richard will be working on a project for the public library; but for now, we have our ritual.

For you, the reader

Do you have any Sunday rituals? Coffee rituals? Let me know in the comments below!

Looking for the World of Dreams

Lately my life has been too many words.

I work with words all day, and especially here in the summer, when I don’t have much else to do. I have been working on several projects, putting the words into place and polishing them up. Short stories, novels, cover letters — all have been revised. But I am weary of words; they’re not inspired at this stage.

Words and Dreams

Inspired words have to come from somewhere. In my case, they come from dreams and daydreams. The realm that is illogical. I dip into that realm, find the inspiration, and use that thought and the energy to influence building out the dream into something readable. This is why I write fantasy instead of, say, historical fiction.

I haven’t had any of that kind of inspiration lately, and it shows. All I have been doing is revising, the brain work. No aha reactions, no warm feeling of having a scenario in my head (in my case it’s in words, not pictures, because of my aphantasia.)

A wake-me-up

A fellow writer in a writer’s group has assigned me to people watching at the cafe, listening to some good music (in my case, either ambient or singer-songwriter compilations). I think I should take notes away from the computer, preferably with my brass Kaweko Sport fountain pen. And I shouldn’t think about what I should write, but see where the inspiration hits me. Hopefully short stories and poems, because with 7 novels and one to be revised and added to, I probably have more than enough novels to consider publishing.

So that’s my plan for this afternoon.

Daily Warmup

Every morning (well, almost every morning) I sit in front of my computer staring at the WordPress site and its little white button that says “Write”. And I write.

In a way, this blog is the warmup exercise for everything else I do in a day, whether it be writing or work. This blog loosens my fingers up and loosens my mind up. There is a full day ahead of me to make of it what I will.

Sometimes that is merely existing, moving myself toward the door with my computer case for a day of work. Sometimes it’s gleefully playing with my cats. Sometimes it’s a productive day at home writing or at work teaching.

But the blogging in the morning is essential, framing my inspirations for the day.

Today’s tasks are monitoring and answering email from students and prepping for Camp NaNo. I have already answered five at 6:20 AM. (This is rare because my students generally abhor mornings.)

It feels like a good day, although one that would benefit from coffee. (Lots of coffee).

Home Roasting Coffee

My husband and I love our coffee, to the point that we actually roast our own. It takes an outlay of equipment and expertise, but for people who like good coffee, it’s cheaper than store-bought gourmet beans and a lot cheaper than a daily Starbucks or Nespresso.

We started with the gateway drug — whole beans and a grinder — and then I found out that one could roast their own beans with an air popper. It’s true; one can roast a pot’s worth of green coffee beans with an air-fired popcorn popper, although there are a couple specs on the air popper that need to be noted. Because it’s tedious to lift the hot lid of an air popper and stick a spoon down the chamber to fish out a bean to see if the beans are done, I bought a simple cylindrical roaster (which isn’t made any more; it was a cheaper version of this). It still only did one batch at a time, but it was a little more convenient.

Both the air popper and the Fresh Roast are what are known as fluid bed roasters. This means that the beans float on a fluid bed (usually air) to allow them to roast easily and not develop hot spots. Fluid bed roasters for the home user usually roast smaller batches (taking a half pound of beans at most) and don’t have much versatility if one wants to experiment with the depth of the roast (light, medium, or dark roast).

Photo by Chevanon Photography on Pexels.com

Eventually, as we drink home-roasted coffee daily, we invested in a Behmor 1600 (as they were phasing in the 2000s, it was half the price of the new model) and we roast a pound of green coffee beans a week. The Behmor will roast 1/2 lb-2 lb coffee at a time and uses a drum to move the beans for even roasting. Richard is our roaster now, because one of the important ways to determine roast strength is listening for the cracking of the coffee bean, and my hearing doesn’t allow for that anymore.

Where does one get unroasted beans? We use a source called Sweet Maria’s Coffee, a mail-order outfit with a great variety of beans ever changing with growing seasons in its various sources. We tend toward adventurousness in our beans, reading flavor notes in the reviews and choosing by those. Then when we’re drinking our morning cup, we rate the coffees on a four-point scale:

I wouldn’t give Grandma this coffee
Grandma drinks this coffee
Grandma should be drinking this coffee
Grandma called: she wants a dime bag to go with this coffee.

We like coffee in the 3-4 range (I’m old enough to be a grandma).

Even with the outlay of the roaster (again, we got it on deep discount because we shopped for sales), we pay a lot less than Starbucks, somewhat less than we would for gourmet beans at the store, and a little less than generic canned coffee, and we get a premium product that’s almost like wine in its complexity.

It’s worth the learning curve.