Author: lpaulriddle

An autumn to remember

lpaulriddle

The title says it all here — it has been an eventful fall, for many reasons, some good and some bad.

Good: My nephew’s wedding. He’s the first in the next generation of the family to marry. It was a great weekend in D.C.

Bad: Losing my cousin. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was too soon, and it was rough.

Good: Visiting college friends who recently moved to Florida. I see more of this kind of thing in our future.

Bad: My annual October/November respiratory illness. For future reference: It started with a sore throat on 10/23, while we were still in FL. The viral part was mild. It never totally knocked me off my feet, and I’m not sure I ever even ran a temperature. The bad part was the aftermath: 3 weeks of laryngitis and middle ear/Eustachian tube congestion (flying a couple of times during the initial onset didn’t help). 4 weeks later, it’s almost out of my system, and I can finally talk normally again, but still have occasional ETD issues. The ETD has mainly affected the right ear, but I did have it in my left ear for a couple of days earlier on.

Bad: Losing one of our cats.

Good: Spending 2 days in Chestertown, MD, for our 24th anniversary. Great town.

Good: Running my first half marathon at age 54 (this morning). This was one of the goals I had set for myself earlier this year, but the outcome was in doubt after a rather tough summer for running and various other obstacles that life threw in the way (some of which are listed above). The run went well, and I averaged 11-minute miles on a windy morning over hilly terrain, which isn’t too shabby for me. I’ve been slower this year than last year, for many of the same reasons it took me so long to go 13.1 miles. However, I did run 6.8 miles at 10:10/mile this past Thursday, so I don’t think I’ve lost a step — It’s more likely that I was just out of practice, and need to work up to faster speeds the same way I worked on increasing my mileage this fall. Not sure where I’ll go from here, goal-wise, but for now, I’m just going to try to run this distance about once per month through spring.

Final Paddle of 2024?

lpaulriddle

I’ve found that the keys to successful weekday morning pre-work paddling are:

  1. Use a launch that is 20 or fewer minutes from home
  2. Plan the paddling route ahead of time to estimate how long it will take
  3. Do as much preparation as possible on the evening prior to paddling:
    • Put kayak on car
    • Gather supplies and clothes together
  4. Leave the house by 7:00am

I was hoping to get out last Tuesday, but didn’t do #2 or #3, and got moving too late for #4. I had better luck today. I launched from Solley Cove Park and paddled upstream on Marley Creek until a little ways past Rt 10. It’s about 3.5 miles one way, and today was the first time I’ve paddled this far along it. It’s kind of like a different world there — very nice and secluded, with lots of waterfowl. The water was deep enough that I didn’t have to worry much about bottoming out. I probably could have gotten a little farther than I did, but the creek was getting narrow and there were a lot of downed branches, and I didn’t want to get stranded by a receding tide (turns out I was there near high tide, but I didn’t know that at the time). I was on the water for a little over 2 hours. The morning started off in the upper 40s, but warmed to near 60 by the time I finished. Initially, I wore my wetsuit, paddling hoodie, neoprene paddling socks and boots, paddling jacket, and pogies. I ditched the pogies after a couple of miles, and at my turnaround point, I traded the hoodie for a hat. Along the way, I saw the usual bevy of blue heron, cormorants, gulls, ducks, geese, and at least one bald eagle. It was a great morning for a paddle, with very little wind (unlike the same day last year). That was my final paddle of 2023, and I suspect today will end up being 2024’s swan song, but as they say, you never know!

Luigi (2008-2024)

lpaulriddle

Random facts about Luigi, in no particular order, and not (yet) edited for grammar:

  • We “adopted” Luigi in March 2009, when she was about a year old.
  • Luigi was never much of a mouser, but she loved chasing after bugs outside our living room picture window on summer nights. You could always tell she was doing it when you heard her leaping up against the glass.
  • Luigi wasn’t big on chasing after toys, but when she was younger, we had a cheap laser pointer that would whip her into a frenzy. We didn’t have one for most of her later years, but like many cats, she would also chase around after those pull tab rings that come with gallon jugs of milk.
  • Luigi truly was the ultimate lap cat, though she liked shoulders even better. The best way to pick her up was to toss her over your shoulder. Later in life, she liked to crawl up onto my chest while I lay on the sofa. Usually, she would get in the way of my laptop screen, and I would have to encourage her to move. She would end up on my lap, or nestled on my left arm against the back of the sofa, and would stay that way until I had to move my arm.
  • Luigi was very vocal. You could always tell she was coming when you heard her meowing. When she settled on your lap, she would meow every time you pet her, until she got tired of it. Then, as she started to relax and settle in, she would start to purr and the meows would change to shorter grunts. When she was really super relaxed, and you pet her, she would open her mouth and make kind of a “silent” meow.
  • Luigi used to nip at you if you pet her too much. When she was a kitten, she would nip to try to get attention. Fortunately, she grew out of that habit before too long.
  • Unlike her sister, Luigi was never much of a dairy/milk fiend. However, when she got older, she became really annoying when I was trying to eat breakfast. She would sit on the table and try to get a lick of whatever I was eating. Picking her up and putting her on the ground was only a temporary fix.
  • Luigi was one of those cats who would scratch the furniture in spite of all of the cat-specific scratch pads around the house. The exception was the “pet friendly” upholstery in the La-Z-Boy furniture we bought for the basement. It was kind of a miracle– she completely ignored it. Instead, she scratched at the crappy carpet on the basement stairs. Not really a great loss there. Occasionally, she would come down and sit on my lap as I sat on the sofa working. When she was tired of that, she would head back upstairs, always stopping to scratch at that crappy carpet on the way.
  • Luigi was not an outdoor cat, but she loved going outside. She would wait for an opportunity to dart out when someone opened the door. Sometimes we’d forget about her until she showed back up on the porch several hours later. If it was raining, she would slink off along the top of the wall flanking our basement walk-out steps, where it was really hard to retrieve her. Later in life, she surprised us by taking off after a rabbit. We didn’t think she had it in her, but we managed to catch her.
  • Luigi was very friendly and social, but unlike her sister, not all that affectionate. But she was always the first to greet guests when they came in, while her sister often ran to hide.
  • Luigi used to hang out in my son Michael’s room a lot, probably because it is the warmest room in the house during the winter. She rarely came into the master bedroom, with the exception of one several-week stretch where she slept in our bed every night. She liked to sleep up near the head of the bed, much to my initial chagrin. However, after a while of this, I got used to it and looked forward to her showing up a few minutes after I retired for the night. This didn’t last– I think I went on a business trip at one point, she relocated back to Michael’s room (or the living room), and that was the end of that.
  • Another of Luigi’s loves was closets. One way to find her was to open the foyer closet, because she’d be sure to come running. Occasionally, we’d either forget about her (or she’d sneak in without us knowing) and she would get stuck in the closet, sometimes for several hours, until someone heard the disembodied meows and figured out where they were coming from.
  • Luigi had a few favorite places to curl up. Her signature spot was inside the living room armoire behind the 32″ flat screen TV. Many times, she would startle us by jumping out from there while we were watching TV.
  • My silly nickname for Luigi was “Luijer”, which is an amalgamation of “Luigi” and “Peejer”, a word that my son Andrew made up when he was 6 or 7.
  • We lost Luigi on November 14, 2024. She was 16. She was a big part of our family, and we will miss her, but I think she lived a good life with us. We buried her out in back of the deck, which was one of the places she enjoyed exploring while she was outside.

LnB Organic Papua New Guinea Light

lpaulriddle
  • Beans:
    • Organic Papua New Guinea Light from Leaves ‘n Beans Coffee (Peoria Heights, IL)
    • Roast level: Light
    • Purchase date: 10/25/2024 at LnB Morton, IL
  • V60:
    • 19g to 19.5g coffee / 300g water
    • Ode: 2+1
    • Water at 99°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with 40g bloom water – finishes 02:45-03:00

These seem to work well with a rather fine grind. I started at setting 4, and worked my way to 2+1 over 3 or 4 cups. Seems to be pretty good at this setting. The bag advertises low acidity, which I’ve found to be accurate. My favorite cup so far was today’s, with 19.6g or so of beans. It was very rich and full-bodied, but a little bit more of a caffeine hit than I would prefer. 19.2g to 19.4g seems like a reasonable compromise.

11/19: I’ve been brewing most of my cups with 19.2g, which (with a couple of exceptions) has been producing what I would consider perfect cups of light roast coffee. I’ll be tempted to buy more of this the next time I’m in Morton, but the desire to try different roasts will likely win out. However, this does raise an interesting point. I should probably come up with some kind of rating system so that I can start to identify which origins/roast levels/processes/etc tend to produce coffee that I like the best. That will help drive my decision process when I’m trying to figure out what to buy when I go somewhere new. Will have to think on this for a bit.

Foxtail Decaf Colombia

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: Decaf Colombia from Foxtail Coffee Co. (Winter Park, FL)
    • Roast level: Medium/Dark (4/5)
    • Roast date: 10/11/2024
    • Purchase date: 10/21/2024 at Foxtail Coffee in Mount Dora, FL
    • Process: Washed
  • V60:
    • 20g coffee / 300g water (1:15)
    • Ode: 5
    • Water at 90°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with 40g bloom water – finishes 03:15-03:30
  • AeroPress:
    • 14.8g coffee / 210g water (1:14.2)
    • JX: 20 (2 rotations)
    • Water at 90°C
    • Prismo with metal + 1 paper filter (rinsed with insta-hot tap water)
    • Pour all water at once / Stir back to front 7x / Steep until 02:45 / Stir 7x again / Press slowly

This is a rather coarse grind setting for this particular recipe, but the beans draw down very slowly, which seems to balance things out. Fairly smooth cup with little to no bitterness. Very roasty/smoky tasting, which I guess is to be expected given that it’s a darker roast.

3/19: These beans aged well, as the last few cups were really smooth and tasty. I used up the last of the beans with the above AeroPress recipe, deliberately making it on the strong side, and it was a really excellent cup. Who needs caffeine, anyways? 😆

Paddling Notes

lpaulriddle

For the third or fourth straight season, I can say I’ve gone paddling in November. The warm stretch we’re having right now inspired me to pony up the $10 + convenience fees for a WSSC daily watershed usage permit, and we hit Rocky Gorge Reservoir and paddled 6 miles. According to the web site, the Scott’s Cove launch (which we’ve used multiple times) was closed for repairs, so we launched from Supplee Lane instead, which is a little bit downstream of Scott’s Cove, and on the south side of the river vs. the north side. I was familiar with this area because of geocaching, but had never launched here before. It has a standard boat-trailer launch ramp that also works for kayaks. There are also port-a-potties, picnic tables, and a playground. Notably, they do not allow SUPs, likely because swimming is not allowed, and there’s a larger chance of inadvertent “swimming” (falling into the water) with a SUP than with a kayak/canoe. But don’t quote me on that.

Nice paddle today with the air temperatures pushing into the 70s. The water felt like mid 60s to 70. We did not need any cold-weather gear. The water level was much lower than the last time we were here, in early July of last year. It made for a weird, almost alien kind of landscape around the edges of the reservoir, but it otherwise was a nice, scenic paddle, although the leaves are a little bit past their peak fall colors now. I enjoy paddling here, although I would never come often enough to justify buying an annual permit ($70, or the cost of 14 day-use permits). I could see myself coming once or twice a year, though.

It looks like temperatures are going to stay warm a little while longer, so I hope to get out one or two more times this season. Last year, my final paddle was November 18.

Foxtail Brazil (Cerrado)

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: Brazil (Cerrado) from Foxtail Coffee Co. (Winter Park, FL)
    • Roast level: Medium
    • Roast date: 10/4/2024
    • Purchase date: 10/21/2024 at Foxtail Coffee in Mount Dora, FL
    • Tasting notes: Almond, milk chocolate, toffee
  • V60:
    • 19 to 19.2g coffee / 300g water (1/15.6 to 1/15.8)
    • Ode: 4
    • Water at 95°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with 40g bloom water – typically finishes at between 02:45 and 03:00

I bought these beans while we were in Florida visiting friends who had just moved down there. The above settings produced a nicely flavored cup. 19.4 grams was a little too strong-tasting, so I think 1:16 may be the sweet spot.

I seem to get more consistent brews with the Ode than I do with my hand grinder. It’s not that I can’t brew good coffee with the hand grinder, but it does seem like I have to play around with the brew parameters a lot more to get things dialed in. On the other hand, with the Ode, I’m finding that I’ll often go through an entire bag of beans without tweaking my starting settings at all. In light of this, I may rethink how I do these blog posts at some point. I want to continue to track how I’m brewing various beans (mainly to have something to refer back to if I buy them again) but I don’t want to fill this space up with repetitive posts. Maybe I could start creating pages instead, or take them out of WordPress entirely and move everything into a spreadsheet. I will have to think on this a little bit.

Rise Up Organic Decaf Coffee

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Organic Decaf Coffee” from Rise Up Coffee Roasters (Easton, MD)
    • Roast level: Medium (3/5)
    • Origin: Ethiopia (Yirgacheffe)
    • Roast date: 9/24/2024
    • Purchase date: 10/9/2024 at Green Valley Marketplace (Elkridge, MD)
  • V60:
    • 19 to 19.2g coffee / 300g water (1/15.6 to 1/15.8)
    • Ode: 4
    • Water at 95°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with 40g bloom water

This was my first time brewing decaf coffee with the V60. I brewed it using the same settings I would start with for any other medium roast, and it turned out well-balanced and bright. Most of the decaf I’ve had over the years has been akin to brown, vaguely coffee-flavored water, so I was pleasantly surprised. I bought this mainly for my better half, but I may occasionally sneak a cup for myself if I find myself wanting coffee later in the evening. We’ll probably freeze some of the beans to try to keep them fresh for longer, as I doubt we’ll go through them as fast as I go through a typical 12-to-16 ounce bag. I’m sure I’ll buy these again.

11/21: I froze what we had left of these on around 10/19-10/20, and took them out at the beginning of this week. They seem to have survived the freezer just fine, as the above settings produced another good cup (from what I could tell from the sip or two I took of it). That said, I think if we buy 12 ounces of decaf beans at a time, we should have no problem going through them fast enough to avoid having to freeze them. It’s good to know that we can, though.

Lola Savannah Texas Pecan

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Texas Pecan” from Lola Savannah Coffee (Houston, TX)
    • Roast level: Light
    • Origin: unknown (Arabica)
    • Roast date: unknown
    • Purchase date: received as gift on 10/12/2024
  • V60:
    • 19 to 19.2g coffee / 300g water (1/15.6 to 1/15.8)
    • Ode: 3+1
    • Water at 99°C
    • Recipe: Single Cup V60 Pourover with 40g bloom water

I received these as a gift from family who live in Texas. Started out at grind setting 4, but have been nudging it finer with good results. Currently at 3+1. I have also been using less bloom water recently. As long as I get all of the beans wet, and the water stays in the cone long enough to swirl a few times, I’ve been getting good results using a little over 2x the coffee weight. It also worked well with my last bag of beans.

I’m not normally a flavored coffee drinker, but I do like these quite a lot. The aroma is fantastic if you like pecans/pralines, and the taste is very smooth with no hints of acidity or bitterness. Also, when the bag is gone, I’ll have an excuse to learn how to tear down and clean the Ode, as I kinda don’t want my next several bags of beans to taste like pecans. 😀

MTB Season Again

lpaulriddle

I haven’t been doing much biking lately, outside of commuting to the office once or twice a week. My weekend biking/geocaching excursions have become fewer and farther between, due to a combination of busy schedule, running taking priority over biking, and lack of interesting caches being hidden within biking distance of home. I expect I’ll get out on a few more weekends this year, particularly with the pool now closed, which removes swimming as another exercise option. I’ve been splitting my commuting between road and mountain biking, with a strong preference for the latter. Every time I commute on roads, I wonder how I did it 3-4 times a week “back in the day” without going insane. It’s just a pain dealing with all of the annoying people who are out on the roads. Mountain biking is much more peaceful and enjoyable, though more so in the mornings when there are fewer people on the trails. Other than a week or two at the end of September, we’ve had great weather for mountain biking so far this fall. This morning was in the 40s and sunny, which is just about perfect. I’m taking advantage of it as much as I can, before we start getting hard freezes, which lead to muddy trails in the afternoons.

One thing I’ve been rather unhappy about this year is my lack of kayaking during the second half of the season. I was really good about getting out in the spring, but haven’t been out since probably June. The brutally hot summer was the culprit early on. September and October are my favorite months of the year to kayak, but this year, schedule and transportation issues have been my undoing. I like to go out on weekday mornings, but I need a car to do that, and this year, my son has been taking the car to college most days. I’ll probably have to break down and go on a Saturday or Sunday morning if I want to get out before the season ends. I suspect that a drysuit is in my future at some point, as I’d love to keep paddling year-round. Not sure if that’s in the cards for this year or not, though.