Watery concoctions that have lost their souls

This weekend, in the process of getting things back in order after my parents visit combined with making preperations for our upcoming journey to Utah, I got the chance to go to a spot that I used to frequent when I lived in Belltown, El Diablo Cafe in in Upper Queen Anne. I used to love heading up there on Sunday mornings for thier authentically brewed Cuban Coffee. Before heading into the store, however, I noticed a new (to me) establishment, Wink Cupcakes. They were closing up, so I bought Carrie a Peanut Butter cupcake and a Vanilla one for myself (Carrie proclaimed hers to be "the best cupcake that (she) ever had!"). I went into El Diablo to get my drink - a Cuban Coffee, and was a bit disappointed; whereas their Cuban Coffees used to be a rich, frothy brew full of flavor, this one was a watery concoction that seemed to have lost its soul.

Speaking of watery concoctions that have lost their souls...

I went driving around Queen Anne and, in the course, of such, got the chance to think a bit. It seems that neighborhoods here in Seattle have become clones of each other. Slowly but surely, older apartment buildings are being replaced with the brick, glass and brushed concrete of condominiums, neighborhood-specific shops are closing down, and chains, both local and national, are moving in, and the population that served to lend a genuine color to the local scenes are being replaced with haughty, bleached out yuppies, soccer moms and older professionals. My old haunts of Ballard, Greenwood, Fremont, Greenlake, Wallingford, Belltown and Capitol Hill have fallen by the wayside; Columbia City and the Central District are in the process of becomming agresssively getrified themselves, and I'm sure that someone has thier eye on Georgetown and Beacon Hill. Or not. I can only hope that the latter two communities are able to retain thier working class and (in the case of Georgetown) industrial flair for a few more generations. Or years, even.




Finally....


I've started a new blog that is dedicated to my somewhat varied (as in quality) writings. Please be warned that there is rough language on this site. Without further ado, I give to you C.A.'s Cafe!!!

Excuse Me!!!

Saturday morning, I went to the bakery to pick up coffee and treats for Carrie and myself. If you've ever been to Columbia City Bakery, you'll know that after 9 or so on the weekends the place is packed. The line for coffee and treats was almost going out the door, and all of the tables were full.


So, you would think that people, being cognizant of the fact that space was at a premium, would behave accordingly and not expect the sea of people to automagically part at their merest approach, wouldn't you?


Into the pictrure comes stereotypical passive-aggressive bearded slacker Seattle guy. He's taking his order of coffee and scones to the high-top where his generously smiling girlfriend is waiting for him. He is about to pass in front of the couple who are in line ahead of me. Does he utter those magical words that have served as the sociospatial lubricant for generations - "Excuse me"? NO! He simply waves his food in the general direction of the table, and, not even looking at the people that he's pushing his way past, proceeds to - push his way past the people whose mere existence he can't be bothered to acknowledge.


Time passes. The couple ahead of me is served. My order is taken. I stand to the side to wait for coffee. Meanwhile, Mr.Stereotypical passive-aggressive bearded slacker Seattle guy, along with his girlfriend, Ms. I'm obviously the better socially adjusted of the two of us, finish their meal. He, avoiding my gaze, pushes his way past me and seems genuinely puzzled as to both why he is tripping over my unmoving size 13 foot and why he needs to exert something other than a cursory amount of force to make his way past my mostly unyielding elbow. She, for her part, smiles as if to say “Yes, I am with him, please don’t hold it too much against me”, gives me a quick and quiet “Excuse me” as she works her way by, and I gladly stand back to accommodate her passing. He glares at me, as if mad that I dare to accede to her spoken request whilst not doing the same for his unspoken one.


So - they leave. But if you think that’s the end of the story- fear not! For here comes Ms. Stereotypical passive-aggressive I live in a trendy gentrified neighborhood and you are just a visitor here Seattle older woman! C’mon – didn’t you know that there’s a table open, and this gal has to eat? Sure, I may be 6’0 and 230 pounds, but be sure that she will make sure that all 5’6, 140 lbs of her will somehow find a way to attempt to violate the first law of physics with your self before she even thinks about giving you a dirty look.


*Sigh*


Since when did saying “Excuse me” become passé? Is it because saying those two little words could be considered being tantamount to admitting that you are not in total control of the space around you,? Or have people just become that damn lazy and inconsiderate? Okay, okay – I’ll not tar all of humanity with the same brush – it just seemed to me, on that day in Columbia City, that certain individuals were going out of their way to be rude.


At least that didn’t color my entire weekend. Since Carrie wanted to clean the house in preparation for my parents’ visit, I elected to take los Gemelos out for a ride. When I came back two hours later, the house was sparkling clean, and the mama was beaming, happy with her progress. Sunday, I went for a run around Green Lake (2.8 miles in 27 minutes 6 seconds), and then, meeting a friend for the Top Pot 5k, walked for 3.1 miles around the same body of water. I came home, tired, but feeling otherwise pretty good, and spent the rest of the day as a pretty quiet day with Carrie and the kids.


Two more days to go!

Yesterday...

Yesterday was one hell of a day.

I stayed at home so that I could watch over the kids for part of the night (allowing Carrie to get more than 4 hours of straight sleep), and had planned on working from home the rest of the day after a brief nap. So, as planned, I took over Gaboli duty (Gaboli being the portmanteau that Carrie and I came up with to refer to the twins collectively) at three in the morning, and proceeded to stay up with them until around five, at which point they calmed down enough so that I could get a couple more hours of sleep. When I woke up around seven, they were stirring a bit, so I took them to Carrie so that she could feed them.

At this point, I had planned on taking a quick nap for a few hours, and then getting up so that I could do some work. So, I crawled into bed and was about to doze off when I received a call from Sarah’s (my ex wife) stepfather, Sonny. It seems that she had opened an account at a credit union and listed me as a co-owner. When she had passed away, full control had reverted to me. So as not to disturb Carrie and the kids, I took the call outside of the bedroom. While I was talking to Sonny, I decided to pull up the bank accounts on my Mac and confirm that I had primary control. Seeing that I did, I then went about talking to both Sonny and the bank to see what needed to be done so that Sarah’s husband could get the money out of the account.

Upon hanging up, I noticed that my computer was acting strangely. Despite clicking around the desktop, I was unable to access any applications, and there was no response to my keystrokes. With a sinking feeling – I had seen this before – I hard-rebooted my computer, only to get the dreaded Mac OSX Question Mark of Death.

For the second time since I had bought the machine, my hard drive had crashed. Damn.

Luckily, I had my work computer with me, so I was still able to get some work done and make an appointment at the Apple store in Tukwila so that I could get my computer fixed. But replacing the internal hard drive on a Macintosh is not an inexpensive proposition – I ballparked the estimate at $300. But it had to be done. Needless to say, the culmination of events left me more than a little upset. I had to jump through some hoops to help Sarah’s husband get the money that he was rightfully due, my hard drive had crashed, I would have to drive twenty miles to get it fixed, I would have to spend money, and a good deal of my music and photographs were gone. 

So, I did what any self-respecting man would do to deal with all of this.I went for a run. 

I ended up doing two miles in slightly under twenty minutes, and I found myself at my favorite spot nearby, Columbia City Bakery. I treated myself to my usual quad shot of espresso, chilled for a bit in the cool, sunny outside area, and walked back home, having gained a bit of perspective.

The rest of the day went pretty well. I got some work done, helped out with the kids, and took my computer in to get fixed. Pleasant surprise: since there have been so many issues with the hard drives on Macbooks, they replaced mine free of charge. Even better surprise: since the smallest hard drive they had on hand was a 160Gig model, they slapped that one in there for me. Sweet!

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!

Lottie's Lounge

Our favorite hangout, Geraldine's, was closed, so Carrie and I decided to take our her parents and take a chance on Lotties Lounge.  The food itself was excellent - I  had the Italian Sausage grinder, Carrie had Ham, Swiss and Arugula, and while I forget what her parents had, no one had anything but good things to say about their sandwiches, They also serve an excellent chili soup and clam chowder as well. Carrie's clam chowder came out cold, though, and we had to send it back.

The reason I marked them down from four stars was the service. The woman tending bar had her back turned to us for much of our visit while she was busy futzing about with her bar tabs. It took her five minutes to get around to giving us our menus, and another ten to get around to giving us our check (plus five to get her attention so that she could get my wife's clam chowder warmed up).  The music was way too loud as well. As good as the food is, I won't be going back,

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