Good afternoon, Cleveland winter....I'm snowed into my apartment with my boyfriend, who's tiny car is hidden underneath a snowdrift, thank you plow. We're expecting between 7 and 14 inches in the next couple of days. In a city where it's winter 9 months out of a year, you'd expect to get used to it. Never fails to depress the living hell out of me. The morning was spent playing a rousing game of scrabble (did you know 'sonsie' is a word? It means 'comely'. Which means.....?) in which I won by -90 points...and drinking some funky fresh medium dark roasted sumatran from our beloved french press, ground slightly finer than I would for auto drip. I'm a fan of Indonisian coffees generally, and appreciated this satisfying cup with a buttery mouth feel and an interestingly penetrating aftertaste that you could feel dissipate into a completely clean nothing. It also had a nice cherry or blackberry undertone to it, and was all around good drinking. In general, I like to play around with my grind setting when pressing coffee, because just like with espresso you'll generate a completely new flavor depending on how much surface area of the bean is exposed to the water. But you already know that. In any case, that was some fiiiiine ass brew.

The rest of the day will be spent cleaning, as we can't leave unless we want to trudge through the white hellish streets to find another place to go, and trying to figure out what to do with this can of vegan pork I bought at an Asian market....

Tonight we'll try and convince our friends to leave their warm apartments and hang out at ours. We're going to cook up some turkish coffee and read the grounds in the cup (similar to reading tea leaves) for shits and giggles. We've got the cardamom and cloves and ibrik, we just need the company. We bought some coconut flavored tobacco for our hookah and expect that it will be a rolling good time with records spinning, our pet rats pissing on our friends (we don't know how to end this problem, but hey, it makes us laugh), hot beverages, wine, smoke, and general geek-dom. Inevitably, the tv (KILL IT) will end up turning on, most likely playing X Files episodes (what of it) or the Peter Serofinowich(sp) show. In any case, it will be fun. I hope winter ends soon. I miss the mega bike rides that took off from the Phoenix hangout in my city (Lakewood, borders Skeeveland to the west), with roughly 50 or so drunk ass kids, whiskey bottles in back packs, coffee buzzes, wine in a can, u-lock knuckles fisted at drivers with attitude, and police officers generally hatin'. The weekly vegan potlucks at the park were equally debaucherous and fun, and hanging out at the beach with nothing better to do but smoke excessive cigarettes and write our names in the crusty ass dirt. The random parties, dance nights, shows, and public art making were pretty fantastic too. Reminiscing like woah dudes, please return my summer.

I desperately want to live in some posi, hot weather, bean pushing town, but the truth is that Cleveland is the land of broken, shit talking, angry souls and their antithesis: uplifting, change making, movers, shakers, spiritualists, herbalists, artists, etc....and it's an unusual dichotomy. Would I appreciate the positive as much if everyone around me was striving for it, or do I need a place with shit smeared all over it to see the good and strive to be a part of it?

I think general travel would be good for me, to be a transient for a little while and culture shock myself into a new mode of thought and action, come back with either the discovery that this is the place I should be, or with a severe homesickness for someplace else that I barely know intimately enough to call home.

This should end on a coffee related note, shouldn't it....Coffee changes the world, it changes the people who come in contact with it every step of the way. Initiating a positive change through something as seemingly ordinary as coffee will impact a lot of people, be it through a barista, a roaster, a broker, a co-op, a farmer. I've always felt like just one person amongst a giant organism of billions, just one cell, and it always strikes me how closely related everyone is, that despite culture and all we're still more alike than we aren't. It always strikes me that the coffee industry is one that unites millions, if not billions, every day.

See what winter does to me?? I need a vacation. Send me some sunshine, I'm dying over here......