the hypothetical wren

Look! There’s a whole quarter-inch of snow on the ground. Not a great flurry, but at least we will have one snow day this winter.

Not a lot of people out walking around at 7:30 this morning, when it was 15 degrees outside. There was only one set of footprints in the snow on the sidewalk before I put mine down — most people sensibly decided to stay home. This morning was interesting. UNM went on a two-hour snow delay (meaning that all classes before 10 a.m. were cancelled), but there was no system-wide email sent out to actually let people know. I didn’t even think about the fact that there might be one (after all, there just wasn’t that much snow), until a student in my 8 a.m. class emailed me to see if we were having class. Without the official notice, I wasn’t sure what to tell her, but I made my way to class, anyway, to find a completely empty room. I waited around for a while, and a couple of students straggled in — ones, who, like me, don’t watch or listen to the news in the morning.[1] I let them go, since I figured out at this point that class was actually cancelled. It was nice to have the extra free hour or so this morning, but I would have rather spent it in bed.

[1] I can’t even stand having NPR on in the morning. Having a good morning is a delicate thing for me. There must be good coffee, something to eat, something decent to read, sun coming through the window, and complete silence. Otherwise, I get cranky and have a headache that won’t go away.

Today….

…it actually felt like late fall. Or early winter. It was grey and cold, and for the first time this month, felt like a proper November. Tomorrow, it might even snow. Too bad my warm winter coat no longer fits well.

Here are some leaves (still vaguely green, and still on the trees this late in the year) against the grey sky.

Tuesday’s photo — not the best. I took this one as an experiment (had to use the flash, which I hate), and then the camera batteries died, so this is the Photo of the Day in more than one sense.

Anyway, this is my collection of stovetop espresso makers. This is one of the few things I even come close to collecting. I have a little aluminum 3-cup (left), a blue and silver 6-cup (middle), a towering, impressive 12-cup model that my mom found at a yard sale, and which I’ve never used (that’s a lot of espresso). Not pictured is the one that hangs out near the stove, the one which I occasionally use. It’s stainless steel, not aluminum — makes the coffee taste less metallic.

It’s strange that I have so many of them, given a) the small size of my apartment (especially the small amount of space devoted to tchotchkes), and b) the fact that I strongly prefer French-press coffee. Why, then, do I have them?

Well, for one, they have such a classic design. The essential shape of the moka/stovetop espresso maker hasn’t changed since the 1930s (a good decade overall for design), except for minute variations in color, handle shape, etc. (Stainless-steel models are an exception — I’ve never seen an SS one that’s in the traditional shape or style of their aluminim counterparts.) Also, they seem so simple, especially when compared with espresso machines. French-press nerds, geeks, and malcontents are bad enough, but the Espresso People take things to an entirely new level of technique, gadgetry, and anal-retentive exuberance. So many models to try! So many drinks to make! And, overall, I’m just not all that excited about the result — espresso that I’ve been told is “good” espresso always tastes too acidic (or “bright” to use the geek term) to me. Stovetop machines take away all the need for fussy gadgetry — put the grounds in and go. They seem like the kind of coffee maker you use when you’re trying to simplify things in your life, trying to travel light or start over. Just you in a small apartment somewhere with a chair, a good book, an open window and your stovetop espresso maker. This would make it somewhat contradictory for me to own four of them that I don’t really use, wouldn’t it?

In other news, briefly, those people in Pagosa Springs get to keep their peace-sign wreath up. Not entirely sure how a peace sign is construed as Satan’s symbol. Two things are certain, though:

1. Homeowner’s associations are evil (the real Satan’s symbol? Unaccountable, unpredictable forms of pseudo-goverance, dedicated to emblazing petty concerns over paint colors and “propriety” into contract law?)

2. Lots of people in my home state are infected with The Crazy. Now that I’m not living there, it becomes more and more obvious how many odd, stupid news stories have some sort of Colorado connection.

My grandma gave me some new coffee mugs while I was in Roswell. (They’re “new” in the new-to-me sense, since they came from the Salvation Army.) There’s four mugs in the set, they all have similar decorations on them, and they were made in Turkey. These are serious, substantial mugs. Each holds a large amount of the requisite morning French-press coffee. The base of each flares out widely, so I can put one safely on the arms of my overstuffed chair without it wobbling around, threatening to tip over. These are worthy additions to my coffee-up collection.

The big problem they cause, though, is that I don’t really have room for them. I moved some things around in my cabinets, so that they all barely fit. However, you can’t see the rest of my coffee cups once the four new additions are in place. The obvious solution would be to get rid of some, but at this point, I don’t seem to have any spare mugs. I’ve whittled my collection down to the ones I like the most, or have the most meaning, so I can’t see getting rid of any. I would have to sacrifice one of the following:

• the mug I bought when I still worked at the Gap in the Cherry Creek Mall (approximately 1995 — don’t have much from this time). Still functional, although I’ve had to glue its handle back on a few times now.
• the mug I bought in New Orleans on my 30th birthday (2004).
• the Deruta cup I bought at Torrefazione Italia (which is more or less gone now — the coffee, not the cup)
• the blue mug I got in The Great Breakup of 1999 (only thing I have from that)
• the mug with the badly painted, barely discernable picture of San Francisco on it (I bought it for how bad the painting was)
• the white cup with black polka dots on it (very visually satisfying)
• the green cup I have that tries to be both square and round at the same time (unusual, but also has great solidity and heft)
• the mug my dad bought in Alaska this summer
• the glass mug seen in this photo — best for green tea

Yes, I get attached to my coffee mugs, in a way I don’t get attached to other sorts of things I own. I think it’s because they are part of an important morning ritual that I get a lot of enjoyment. Plates just serve food, whereas mugs are full of coffee. What could be more important?

(If you were wondering, the book underneath the mug is Richard Lehan’s The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, which I hope to have the time to read sometime soon, perhaps over break.)

It’s going to be an interesting two weeks. I have 40 pages of academic “product” to churn out before 11 December, in between grading papers and writing a lecture that I’m supposed to give next week. I’ll get it done, although I’m not going to enjoy it. There are so many things I’d rather be doing (sleeping, eating, exercising, and staring blankly into space are among the many choices).

I got back from Roswell this afternoon, ready to get some work done after the three-day Family Eating Spectacular (which will take days of broccoli and to counteract). The drive wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I still hated driving back, especially on the interstate. One theme that keeps framing my daily activities and other things I decide to do is how much I hate driving. One thing that I enjoy about where I live is that I don’t have to drive anywhere most days. I live 15 minutes away from work, 15 minutes from the closest (and admittedly skanky) grocery store, and 25 minutes away from a good grocery store (the co-op) on foot. I like being a pedestrian, even though many drivers in ABQ don’t really like to concede the right-of-way to others.

The above picture was taken on my walk this afternoon from my apartment to my office. There’s a new crop of stencil graffiti on the UNM campus, and this was the best one I saw today. There’s a lot of smoke coming out of that tractor, though.