Lipstick on a Pig
14/11/20 07:04
I cannot for the life of me get my espresso machine to work properly. Maybe it's just getting a little long in the tooth. The part that annoys me is the part that I can see. Wisps of steam begin to appear in and around the cap shortly after the water starts to heat up. The wisps turn to something more akin to a whirling dervish in the blink of an eye. I'm not smart enough to know what, if any, difference it makes when all is said and done but my sneaking suspicion is that my cup of espresso has been marginalized. That is never a good thing.
I'm also learning a lot about how to "read" what comes out of the machine during the expressing of the actual espresso. The moment the first syrup-like drips appear in the bottom of the cup, and they more closely resemble blood or mud than anything else, it is a coagulation of caffeine at its finest until that very moment when the syrup thins and the transition to "watery" begins. The trick is removing your cup just before the changeover and just after you see the crema forming as a reddish-brown froth on top of your espresso.
If my machine is not doing what it should be doing due to faulty parts or whatever, I am going to need to find a replacement. I would replace the parts but I fear my machine is too old and the parts I think I need may no longer be available. I refuse to consider used parts since they too may be compromised and I will just be delaying the inevitable. Looking online this morning I see machines ranging in price from $29.99 to well over $1,000. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in there for a guy who doesn't need a Mercedes but probably wouldn't be happy with a Volkswagen?
Here we go again. Evan has a sore throat so he'll need to go get a Covid-19 test. We think he may have mentioned that he had a sore throat not realizing that one thing would lead to another so that is where we are at the moment. Nancy will schedule a test for him asap and we'll see where that goes. I'm sure it's nothing but that's just me. (Update-Covid test was negative.)
We can't be turning people's lives upside down every time they get a goddamn case of the sniffles. People in Evan's age group have a mortality rate of near-zero so that's another reason not to fret unnecessarily. But all of the gnashing of teeth is just too much. I swear to God, he has his mother's fretting gene. His anxiety over it all is just over the top. Did I mention we spent time with him a few days ago?
The weather hereabouts as of late has been unseasonably warm. I like warm but not too warm this time of year. It's a blazing 62 degrees at the hour of 8 something in the morning. It's probably not a bad day to do some work outside. Just a bit of last minute tidying up, really. I certainly won't need the extra layers when biking today so that's good. I've been trying to synch up my wardrobe with the changing weather as of late and I've been failing miserably. There is nothing worse than wearing one too many layers when you needed one or more fewer. I've had the gloves out too but not today.
It's hard to think about Thanksgiving on days like today but think about Thanksgiving we must. Mrs G mentioned that she might be getting together with a group of folks in her facility for dinner at her place so that's good. Gatherings of any kind are generally taboo during the era of Covid so that provides an adequate backdrop for those not wishing to participate due to health concerns, etc.
Crossing state lines to spend time with family members can be a risky proposition in and of itself according to the CDC. Here's my advice: Bring an extra box of Kleenex. We'll probably hunker down here at home with a nice turkey from Trader Joes. There's something to be said for tradition. We usually get a natural or organic turkey with all the fixings. We'll pop that sucker in the oven 9-ish for a dinner time of between 3 and 4 if all goes well. Nancy will make her grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe for dessert and all will be well with the world.
There will be no jello molds, boiled onions or, god forbid, fruit cake from days of old. We'll have Alice's Restaurant on the "record player" to set just the right tone and Nancy will be making her own version of cranberry sauce made with real cranberries. We can thank Sleepy Joe Biden for re-introducing the term "record player" back into the American lexicon just in time for the holidays. Will there even going to be a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year?
I told Nancy that spending over $3 for a cup of regular coffee at Starbucks is a bridge too far. I was fine spending $2 and a little more but they recently raised the price to over $3 so I think I'm done with those bastards. Their specialty coffees are well over $5 and I am, truth be told, partial to their Flat White now and then. I don't know why I tolerate this but I've been sharing my coffee purchases with Nancy all these years so it's kinda like a two-for-one deal when we buy a beverage. That makes the astronomical price point more tolerable but just barely.
Don't get me wrong. I love their coffee so I won't be abandoning them altogether. Instead, I'll buy a bag of beans and make the coffee at home. Not the specialty ones but rather just the regular coffee of the day drinks. Their Thanksgiving Blend is all the current rage and I might want to grab a bag before it disappears and is replaced with their even more famous, Holiday Blend. Oh, and instead of buying a new espresso machine I broke down and ordered a replacement part off E-bay this morning to see if that doesn't fix the problem I'm having. It's worth a try.
I was telling Nancy that it cost me $45 to buy a bicycle tire yesterday. I'd forgotten how expensive bicycle tires can be. I know I sound very cost conscious today when talking about everything from Thanksgiving turkeys to garden variety coffee drinks but that's fairly far from the truth. I don't usually give a hoot.
Maybe when you start to pay attention to such things you get a wake-up call of sorts. But, when it comes to bicycle tires, I can spend less on car tires which is just bass ackwards. And why am I having to replace tires on a bicycle that I bought just eight months ago? What's up with that?
Do you ever have one of those days when you have little direction, little or no control or restraint when it comes to eating things that you know you'll regret eating, and little or no impetus to do those things like exercise that you know are good for you? That was yesterday for me. I knew it when it was happening and I was incapable of putting a stop to any of it.
I took a long nap hoping to snap out of my sugar induced malaise but woke up too late to enjoy much of anything left of the day which, not incidentally, was slipping away by the minute. It was a lesson about what not to do and how not to get off on the wrong foot on any given day of the week. Maybe more to the point, it was a lesson on what not to eat knowing full well what having too much or not enough of one thing or another can mean. When your momma tells you, everything in moderation, you best be listening.
As of this moment, there are 70 plus million people who voted for Trump and most of those people don't and won't accept the fact that Sleepy Joe Biden got more votes than Trump. Are there really 78 million people who voted to put a demented, cognitively impaired, a candidate who can't complete a full sentence even with the help of a teleprompter, and a candidate with an unnatural and even perverted affection for young children is on full display on the internet in pictures and on video, into the highest office of the land?
There is only one conclusion you can reach. That is, the democrats managed to steal the 2020 election. They hijacked the electoral process to gain power. That leads us to one more inescapable conclusion: Joe Biden will be now and forever more be an illegitimate president. We Trump supporters must resist and reject the Biden presidency with every fibre of our being. That is essentially what they did to Trump for four years so what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We will be a polarized citizenry and for good reason. We simply cannot abide this kind of treachery and treasonous behavior by any political party.
Where can we Trump supporters go now to get the skinny without all of the propaganda spewed by the leftists and their minions in the media? I stopped watching CNN a long time ago when it became clear from the day Trump came down the escalator that they were going to destroy him with their every last breath. I've watched fewer and fewer people on FOX over time and have now completely walked away after seeing their analysts turn their vitriol towards Trump and his supporters. There's always Newsmax and OANN, and of course there's Parler in the social media space that, if nothing else, will suffice as Twitter Lite.
Public spaces like Twitter and Facebook now shadow ban conservative voices so you might as well keep your comments to yourself since anything you have to say is going nowhere anyway. You might think that your comments are out there for your tens of thousands of followers to see but you would be wrong. You might as well be shouting into a fucking hole in the ground. Just look at the number of impressions that any one of your tweets gets and you'll know what I'm saying is true. It's not censorship in the truest sense of the word, but it's darn close.
I don't think anyone knows where this is all going over the next four years with Biden in office but I'm not hopeful. I prefer to think of it as a period of time where we simply have to resist and reject before we can restore sanity to the office of the presidency and, to a larger extent, to our country. Trump has exposed the left at every level in and out of government so we now know who and what we're dealing with. We know what corruption looks and smells like and we know it when we see it. Our bullshit meters have never been more finely tuned thanks to Trump's calling it out for what it is over the last four years.
Maybe I'll just keep a running list of the left's lunacy as I see it unfold over the next four years. Maybe that's the least I can do if for no other reason than to say after it's all over that I wasn't wrong in my assessment of what a Sleepy Joe Biden presidency would look like. Keep in mind that Sleepy Joe will probably not be the president for long so look for him to be replaced by the even more liberal and looney Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Joe is so demented, even now, that you know he isn't making any decisions that haven't been approved by the cadre of sinister forces that helped him to "win" the election. Don't expect to see much of him going forward. He's just not ready for prime time. Even in his heyday, Joe Biden was not ready for prime time. They didn't refer to him as one-percent Joe for nothing. That was all he could muster in his last two primary runs at the office of the presidency. His Vice President, Kamala Harris, never got more than two percent when she ran in the primaries. Just a couple of real losers.
We've tried to tell you all of this in the months leading up to the election but it seems no one was listening. His minions in the media will do their best when he does appear in public to put lipstick on the pig but it's still a pig at the end of the day. We'll no doubt constantly hear, "what he meant to say is…" and on and on it goes. And the gloating over Trump's loss at the polls, stolen as it was, by the left is likely to make looking at mainstream media even more nonsensical for the millions of us who know the truth. It remains to be seen if that "truth" will ever set us free.
I'm also learning a lot about how to "read" what comes out of the machine during the expressing of the actual espresso. The moment the first syrup-like drips appear in the bottom of the cup, and they more closely resemble blood or mud than anything else, it is a coagulation of caffeine at its finest until that very moment when the syrup thins and the transition to "watery" begins. The trick is removing your cup just before the changeover and just after you see the crema forming as a reddish-brown froth on top of your espresso.
If my machine is not doing what it should be doing due to faulty parts or whatever, I am going to need to find a replacement. I would replace the parts but I fear my machine is too old and the parts I think I need may no longer be available. I refuse to consider used parts since they too may be compromised and I will just be delaying the inevitable. Looking online this morning I see machines ranging in price from $29.99 to well over $1,000. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in there for a guy who doesn't need a Mercedes but probably wouldn't be happy with a Volkswagen?
Here we go again. Evan has a sore throat so he'll need to go get a Covid-19 test. We think he may have mentioned that he had a sore throat not realizing that one thing would lead to another so that is where we are at the moment. Nancy will schedule a test for him asap and we'll see where that goes. I'm sure it's nothing but that's just me. (Update-Covid test was negative.)
We can't be turning people's lives upside down every time they get a goddamn case of the sniffles. People in Evan's age group have a mortality rate of near-zero so that's another reason not to fret unnecessarily. But all of the gnashing of teeth is just too much. I swear to God, he has his mother's fretting gene. His anxiety over it all is just over the top. Did I mention we spent time with him a few days ago?
The weather hereabouts as of late has been unseasonably warm. I like warm but not too warm this time of year. It's a blazing 62 degrees at the hour of 8 something in the morning. It's probably not a bad day to do some work outside. Just a bit of last minute tidying up, really. I certainly won't need the extra layers when biking today so that's good. I've been trying to synch up my wardrobe with the changing weather as of late and I've been failing miserably. There is nothing worse than wearing one too many layers when you needed one or more fewer. I've had the gloves out too but not today.
It's hard to think about Thanksgiving on days like today but think about Thanksgiving we must. Mrs G mentioned that she might be getting together with a group of folks in her facility for dinner at her place so that's good. Gatherings of any kind are generally taboo during the era of Covid so that provides an adequate backdrop for those not wishing to participate due to health concerns, etc.
Crossing state lines to spend time with family members can be a risky proposition in and of itself according to the CDC. Here's my advice: Bring an extra box of Kleenex. We'll probably hunker down here at home with a nice turkey from Trader Joes. There's something to be said for tradition. We usually get a natural or organic turkey with all the fixings. We'll pop that sucker in the oven 9-ish for a dinner time of between 3 and 4 if all goes well. Nancy will make her grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe for dessert and all will be well with the world.
There will be no jello molds, boiled onions or, god forbid, fruit cake from days of old. We'll have Alice's Restaurant on the "record player" to set just the right tone and Nancy will be making her own version of cranberry sauce made with real cranberries. We can thank Sleepy Joe Biden for re-introducing the term "record player" back into the American lexicon just in time for the holidays. Will there even going to be a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year?
I told Nancy that spending over $3 for a cup of regular coffee at Starbucks is a bridge too far. I was fine spending $2 and a little more but they recently raised the price to over $3 so I think I'm done with those bastards. Their specialty coffees are well over $5 and I am, truth be told, partial to their Flat White now and then. I don't know why I tolerate this but I've been sharing my coffee purchases with Nancy all these years so it's kinda like a two-for-one deal when we buy a beverage. That makes the astronomical price point more tolerable but just barely.
Don't get me wrong. I love their coffee so I won't be abandoning them altogether. Instead, I'll buy a bag of beans and make the coffee at home. Not the specialty ones but rather just the regular coffee of the day drinks. Their Thanksgiving Blend is all the current rage and I might want to grab a bag before it disappears and is replaced with their even more famous, Holiday Blend. Oh, and instead of buying a new espresso machine I broke down and ordered a replacement part off E-bay this morning to see if that doesn't fix the problem I'm having. It's worth a try.
I was telling Nancy that it cost me $45 to buy a bicycle tire yesterday. I'd forgotten how expensive bicycle tires can be. I know I sound very cost conscious today when talking about everything from Thanksgiving turkeys to garden variety coffee drinks but that's fairly far from the truth. I don't usually give a hoot.
Maybe when you start to pay attention to such things you get a wake-up call of sorts. But, when it comes to bicycle tires, I can spend less on car tires which is just bass ackwards. And why am I having to replace tires on a bicycle that I bought just eight months ago? What's up with that?
Do you ever have one of those days when you have little direction, little or no control or restraint when it comes to eating things that you know you'll regret eating, and little or no impetus to do those things like exercise that you know are good for you? That was yesterday for me. I knew it when it was happening and I was incapable of putting a stop to any of it.
I took a long nap hoping to snap out of my sugar induced malaise but woke up too late to enjoy much of anything left of the day which, not incidentally, was slipping away by the minute. It was a lesson about what not to do and how not to get off on the wrong foot on any given day of the week. Maybe more to the point, it was a lesson on what not to eat knowing full well what having too much or not enough of one thing or another can mean. When your momma tells you, everything in moderation, you best be listening.
As of this moment, there are 70 plus million people who voted for Trump and most of those people don't and won't accept the fact that Sleepy Joe Biden got more votes than Trump. Are there really 78 million people who voted to put a demented, cognitively impaired, a candidate who can't complete a full sentence even with the help of a teleprompter, and a candidate with an unnatural and even perverted affection for young children is on full display on the internet in pictures and on video, into the highest office of the land?
There is only one conclusion you can reach. That is, the democrats managed to steal the 2020 election. They hijacked the electoral process to gain power. That leads us to one more inescapable conclusion: Joe Biden will be now and forever more be an illegitimate president. We Trump supporters must resist and reject the Biden presidency with every fibre of our being. That is essentially what they did to Trump for four years so what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We will be a polarized citizenry and for good reason. We simply cannot abide this kind of treachery and treasonous behavior by any political party.
Where can we Trump supporters go now to get the skinny without all of the propaganda spewed by the leftists and their minions in the media? I stopped watching CNN a long time ago when it became clear from the day Trump came down the escalator that they were going to destroy him with their every last breath. I've watched fewer and fewer people on FOX over time and have now completely walked away after seeing their analysts turn their vitriol towards Trump and his supporters. There's always Newsmax and OANN, and of course there's Parler in the social media space that, if nothing else, will suffice as Twitter Lite.
Public spaces like Twitter and Facebook now shadow ban conservative voices so you might as well keep your comments to yourself since anything you have to say is going nowhere anyway. You might think that your comments are out there for your tens of thousands of followers to see but you would be wrong. You might as well be shouting into a fucking hole in the ground. Just look at the number of impressions that any one of your tweets gets and you'll know what I'm saying is true. It's not censorship in the truest sense of the word, but it's darn close.
I don't think anyone knows where this is all going over the next four years with Biden in office but I'm not hopeful. I prefer to think of it as a period of time where we simply have to resist and reject before we can restore sanity to the office of the presidency and, to a larger extent, to our country. Trump has exposed the left at every level in and out of government so we now know who and what we're dealing with. We know what corruption looks and smells like and we know it when we see it. Our bullshit meters have never been more finely tuned thanks to Trump's calling it out for what it is over the last four years.
Maybe I'll just keep a running list of the left's lunacy as I see it unfold over the next four years. Maybe that's the least I can do if for no other reason than to say after it's all over that I wasn't wrong in my assessment of what a Sleepy Joe Biden presidency would look like. Keep in mind that Sleepy Joe will probably not be the president for long so look for him to be replaced by the even more liberal and looney Vice President, Kamala Harris.
Joe is so demented, even now, that you know he isn't making any decisions that haven't been approved by the cadre of sinister forces that helped him to "win" the election. Don't expect to see much of him going forward. He's just not ready for prime time. Even in his heyday, Joe Biden was not ready for prime time. They didn't refer to him as one-percent Joe for nothing. That was all he could muster in his last two primary runs at the office of the presidency. His Vice President, Kamala Harris, never got more than two percent when she ran in the primaries. Just a couple of real losers.
We've tried to tell you all of this in the months leading up to the election but it seems no one was listening. His minions in the media will do their best when he does appear in public to put lipstick on the pig but it's still a pig at the end of the day. We'll no doubt constantly hear, "what he meant to say is…" and on and on it goes. And the gloating over Trump's loss at the polls, stolen as it was, by the left is likely to make looking at mainstream media even more nonsensical for the millions of us who know the truth. It remains to be seen if that "truth" will ever set us free.