Note: This dispatch was delayed
owing to the lack of telegraph wires reaching deep into Bear River
Mountains.
Hello Fellow Adventurers!
We are well into this year's safari season and are even now sitting at a wooden table beneath the canvas awning a few meters from a roaring stream. The sun is setting behind the foothills and the oak forest surrounding me is barely disturbed by a current of evening air. MR is sitting nearby, in a camp chair, buried in the latest “must read” novel.
My mind, on the other hand, is preoccupied with matters of higher import. Namely the making of coffee and the wedge it has driven between me and my camp mate.
Over the years I have seen the ships of many blissful marriages shattered upon the cold, windswept, rocks of infidelity, pastry addictions, and even boredom. I am afraid my own blessed matrimonial relationship, which is precarious at the best of times, may end over an argument that has been percolating for several years. That is, who should be in charge of making that essential elixir of life, the breakfast coffee.
Why, just this morning I was at the camp stove deeply focused the alchemy of the bean, surrounded by stainless steel vacuum bottles, Italian funnels, micro filters, a bubbling caldron of spring water, a hand grinder, various precision measuring devices and, of course, the vacuum sealed, dark roasted beans. The very beans that have come to us from the other side of this planet and are as valuable as ground unicorn horn. Suddenly, for no reason, I was accused by MR of doing it all wrong. The coffee, like me, was going to be too weak, that I had ruined it, that life is pointless, and we should just call it quits and go home!
Well, you can imagine my dismay. Apparently, after adding a small bit of precisely temperature controlled water to the grounds so they could “bloom” I had then poured too much water into the filter mechanism and now the coffee was going to be undrinkable and all was doomed.
This is the problem in a nutshell. According to MR you must add 5.253 ounces of very dark roasted coffee for every 3.456 ounces of water for the brew to be STRONG enough. (A ratio she arrived at using a graphing calculator and non-linear equations.) In the past, I have pointed out to her that coffee of that composition could eat through titanium in a matter of minutes, would almost certainly be classified as a hazardous material by JPL scientists, and that it might even be useful as a liquid rocket propellent.
No matter. The argument will continue in this vein at a later time. Ms. Grumpy Pants (MR) went on to drink the coffee sitting in the morning sun and after she fully woke up she was as happy as a clam. For now, all storm clouds have disappeared beyond the horizon over a calm azure sea. The good ship Matrimony sails on for another day.
Over and out for now. I hope you are all successfully overcoming your marital misadventures.
PS. If you would like to see
the safari camp snapshots, just go to www.twinters.com and
click on the photos link! Select the 2014 Smithfield Canyon
album.
