The end of an era (almost)

Pretty soon after we moved into our new house here in Beacon Hill, Carrie and I bought a spiffy espresso machine (a Rancilio Silvia):

From Blogger Pictures

...and a rather run of the mill (no pun intended) Cuisinart grinder:

From Blogger Pictures

Carrie and I are both avid coffee drinkers  - we even had our first date at a local cafe; after moving in together and combining our resources, however, we quickly realized that, between the two of us, we were spending a lot of money on our one-off  trips to the cafe. We had hoped that by investing money in decent equipment up front, we could make our own coffee drinks and save money in the long run.

Problem was, we didn't have all the pieces in play. We had a pretty kick-ass machine in the Silvia, and can always get good beans, but, as Alton Brown would put it, we didnt have all of the elements of good espressso; we had the Macchina Espresso, the Mano dell’operatore could be obtained with time, the Miscela with money, and the Manutenzione kept up on, but our 15-setting  Cuisinart was incapable of delivering the Macinadosatore! We just could not get a fine enough grind of coffee that would produce a decently pulled shot.


So, we splurged yet again, and got this little beauty:

From Blogger Pictures

This Maestro is a smaller, home version of the same grinder that some of the smaller chains and one-off cafes around here use. It has 40 settings, and, sure enough, it does produce a very fine powder that allows us to pull the perfect shot of espresso.


So - why the end of an era (almost)? Well, for both Carrie and I, going out to a cafe is much more than just an opportunity to get coffee. It's a social event - a chance to get out of  the office, away from the home, and see other individuals in a nice, third place setting. We won't be giving that up completely- but we will have to adjust and make this change in our lives.

Sarah Tokas: 1966 - 2010

From Blogger Pictures

(France, 2005)


Yesterday morning, after a fight with pulmonary hypertension, my ex-wife, Sarah Tokas, passed away. She was 43, and is survived by her husband and daughter, Luis and Kathleen.


I first met her back in 1995 in Spain. We were both stationed on the USS Simon Lake at the time, and I just happened to be sitting next to her in our indoctrination class when she turned to me, slapped me on  the shoulder, and playfully demanded to know "what my story was". We struck up a friendship, hanging out in several ports of call before we started going out  a few months later while in our home port of La Maddelena, Italy. We were married in May of 1997 in Palau, Italy, and spent our honeymoon in the provincial capitol of Sassari. After I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and discharged from the Navy in 1997, I followed Sarah as she was transferred to Jacksonville, Florida; Honolulu, Hawaii; and finally Bremerton, Washington.


A combination of factors led to us getting separated and finally divorced, but even after we had made the decision to no longer be a couple, there were no bad feelings between us, and we were always friends; the door of communication was never fully closed between the two of us. Even though we had gone our own separate ways, there was a special place in my heart for her. To me, Sarah was a good, kind, generous person with a magnifiance of spirit and a wonderfully gregarious nature. She lived, laughed and loved with equal ease, and I'm happy to have been a part of her life - and to have had her as a part of mine. Knowing that she is not in this world makes it a slightly darker one for me.


I'd like to share a song that the two of us liked: "You make me feel like peace and love and happiness", by A:Xus. I introduced it to her back in 1999, and she would occasionally ask that  I play it for her on her mellower days.



Goodbye, Sarah

No more c-a-fe.ca

I logged onto my Wordpress installation at c-a-fe.ca this morning, just to discovered that it had been hacked into.  The hack was pretty ineligant at its core - basically, some bot went through all of  my index.html / php files and replaced them all with pages that displayed some crazy faux-pro-Muslim message, along with a pointer to an image being hosted by imageshack, which shows me the truly low caliber of individual that we are dealing with. I managed to fix 95% of the damage, but there were still a few ghost files that I could not suss out. Long story short, I decided that this was an oportune time for me to make a change, and switch my wordpress blog from my private hosting on RoutHost to a sponsored host at wordpress.com. So, I backed up all of my posts, pages, and comments to a new site at http://ccbeans.wordpress.com/. Sadly, I had to leave my beloved CoffeeSpot theme behind, but I kinda like the new layout. I had wanted to use Blogger, but, for some reason, Pages just were not cooperating with me.

My site at c-a-fe.ca expires around the 15th of this month; coincidentally, this is all happening right around the time during which I'd have to renew both my domain name and services anyway, so I get to save some money in the process!