It’s persimmon season. Yum.
They didn’t have persimmons back east where I grew up. Or if they had them, I never saw them. When I first moved out here I saw persimmons in the store, and people told me oh, persimmons are wonderful, you should try them. So I bought a persimmon at some exorbitant supermarket price, brought it home, sliced it into quarters, and put one in my mouth.
It was like eating a handful of bitter flourescent orange dirt. The persimmon immediately sucked all the moisture out of my mouth. I would have said “Bleah! argggh!!” if I had been able to talk, which I couldn’t, because my lips had sealed themselves shut and unfortunately the bite of persimmon was still inside. I staggered around the house waving my arms and knocking over furniture looking for something with which to pry open my jaws. I was eventually able to expel the persimmon and with enough water and time eventually I regained salivary equilibrium. The remainder of the persimmon went into the trash.
I confronted the person who had recommended persimmons to me at work the next day. She laughed at me. “They’re kind of astringent if they’re not ripe,” she explained.
Kind of astringent. Right.
Suffice it to say this experience did not make me want to try persimmons again, ever. It was only later I found out that there are two kinds of persimmons: Fuyu and Hachiya. Fuyus are round like an apple and yellowish-orange. You can eat them the day you take them home from the store, even if they’re still hard and not very ripe, although they’ll taste better if they’re just a little squishy. In either case fuyus are supposed to be crisp and slightly crunchy.
And then there is the hachiya. Hachiyas are acorn-shaped, with pointy ends, and a much brighter orange than fuyus, They are sold hard in the stores. And unless you actually want to have a horrible mouth-sucking experience like I did when I tried one, you cannot eat them when they are hard. With a hachiya persimmon, you have to leave it out on the counter to blet. That is actually the correct technical term: bletting, and its actually a decaying process. No, really. The hachiya doesn’t become riper, but it does soften up and the tannins that make it, well, astringent, go away as it blets. The softer the hachiya, the better it will taste. A hachiya persimmon is not really ready to eat until it has the consistency of a water balloon. You can also quick-blet a hachiya by freezing it and thawing it, but that only makes the persimmon edible without giving you much of the flavor.
And the flavor is everything. Ripe hachiyas have a rich, honey-like flavor. They are thick and sweet and sticky and kind of messy to eat, but they taste wonderful. Because of the mess a lot of people use hachiyas for cooking but I like to eat them with a spoon and my fingers and lick off the plate. Fuyus are good and enable instant persimmon gratification, but it is the hachiyas that I really like.
I used to resist buying persimmons even after I found out how to eat them because they were so expensive in stores. $1.49 each: no. And then I found I just wasn’t talking to the right people. Persimmon trees are fairly common around here; they are a fast-growing tree that doesn’t need a lot of water or a lot of care. After the leaves fall the fruit stays on the tree, like bright orange christmas ornaments. They’re pretty to look at. The problem is that they can grow to be very large trees, they bear really heavily, and once the fruit gets ripe you have to harvest it all because otherwise the water-balloon effect works against you and whatever happens to be standing underneath the tree. It can get kind of icky. Thus, if you own a persimmon tree generally you have way more persimmons than you know what to do with. Owning a persimmon tree is kind of like planting a lot of zucchini: you begin to look around for neighbors with unlocked doors.
So around this time of year I start mentioning in casual conversations that I like persimmons. I bring it up at the gym, at jobs where I’m working. I sigh dramatically and mention the high price of persimmons at the store. And invariably someone will perk up and say “You like persimmons? Thank god. I will bring you some.” And then the next say or so I have a giant grocery bag of persimmons. Or two or three. It never fails.
I usually eat all my persimmons out of hand but one of these days I will cook with them. Persimmon pie and persimmon pudding seem to be popular. Epicurious has a whole bunch of persimmon recipes, including persimmon salsa, persimmon feta and hazelnut salad, and persimmon cardamom sherbet. Yum.
Its enough to make one want to plant a tree.
Its a big year for ten year anniversaries in the web world. 1994 was kind of when everything sort of started to really take off, before things got totally weird.
I realized a couple of weeks ago that I’ve got my own little anniversary to celebrate: we registered the lne.com domain in November of 1994. I’ve had the same email address — lemay@lne.com — for ten years. I’d been on the internet for a bunch of years before that through school and for work, and I had a netcom.com account for my email and for reading usenet (netcom was the cool ISP at the time — for $20 a month you got a dialup account into a text-based terminal window. woo!) Getting your own domain and your own email — that was really l33t back in the day.
In 1994 Eric was working as a sys admin at a startup and I was a tech writer. I had just signed up to write a book about HTML (that’s another story for another time). We both used modems to dial up to our respective internet sites; me to netcom, Eric to work. Eric had an internet connection he used for work so that he could try hacking into his own network (netcom wouldn’t let you run cracking tools on thier system). Eric ran the connection off of his Unix machine, an IBM RT workstation running UNIX that he had acquired when he worked at IBM in the skunkworks BSD project. We’d have to negotiate the use of the office phone line when one of us wanted to dial up to read our email or usenet.
I asked Eric about it this morning and we can’t remember exactly why we decided to set up our own server. Probably it just seemed like a cool idea at the time (and really, does there need to be any better reason?) Eric had heard about this free unix thing called linux and armed with a big printout of exactly the components that were supported by the drivers available at the time he built a PC and installed Slackware Linux on it. It took weeks to get it up and running, with a few trips back to the PC store for different components that would work better. At this point I would like to genuflect in Eric’s direction. His Unix kung fu has always been tremendously superior to mine and to this day while I am a passable user and I can poke at a few config files without bringing everything down (most of the time) I still rely on him to keep our servers and the connection running. He is the dude.
Our net connection originally came from a terrific small local ISP called The Little Garden. The Little Garden was actually a chinese restaurant down the street from us; they made really great dry braised string beans. It was a known geek hangout in the valley and when the ISP started they named themselves after the restaurant. Neither the restaurant nor the ISP exists anymore (sigh).
Our original domain name was actually skidpad.palo-alto.ca.us. A skidpad is a thing you use in driving classes to practice braking maneuvers. It was Eric’s idea. I really hated that domain name, mostly because it was really long and real annoyance to type. So Eric said that I should come up with something else.
I sat down with Brewer’s phrase and fable and the whois command and started looking up .com domain names. Even in 1994 a surprisingly large number of the good ones were already taken. Eric vetoed a bunch of my ideas as stupid (says he who came up with “skidpad,” humph). Finally in exasperation I proposed el.com: eric and laura. Short. Basic. Explanatory.
It turned out that at the time you couldn’t have two-letter domain names. So then I suggested lne: Laura N Eric. Still short, kind of cutesy, but still explanatory. We could use it for a business name if we ever started a business (and I actually do use it now as my consulting name). Eric did the paperwork, tithed the right gods and slaughtered the appropriate goats, and after some small amount of DNS confusion we had lne.com set up.
We ran our server out of the home office on a 28.8kbps modem connection, something that was completely ridiculous even in 1994, but all we had was email and that wasn’t that bad. Later on I set up a web server (CERN httpd! woo!) and we went to 56K which was still ridiculous to run a server over but the web site was only a few pages so it wasn’t that bad either. I finally got around to moving the web server to a real hosting provider (the one you’re reading now) just a few years ago, but lne.com still hosts our email and still runs off the same slow 56K connection (as I’ve mentioned before, we live in the boonies and cannot get broadband. If there’s anyone running a wimax trial in the south bay who would like an ultra early adopter to hammer on it, we would love to hear from you).
It seems kind of silly to get nostalgic over a domain name now when domain names are so cheap and so easy to set up that with a single click on a web site you can order a domain for any stupid idea that pops into your head (I think I own like ten; I forget). But lne.com in its creaky old age and three-letter cache represents a lot of the old-school DIY internet that we were doing at the time — putting up your own connection, installing your own server software, coding your own pages in raw HTML with a text editor. lne.com also means stability: I don’t know a lot of people who have had the same email address for ten years. People move, change jobs and lose ISPs and spam forces them to move (we’re stubborn about it). I’m still lemay@lne.com, and I still expect to be lemay@lne.com ten years from now. On the internet, where time is measured in dog years and nothing ever stays the same, lne.com is practically carved in stone. I like that.
Over the last few days, we have been completely plagued by crickets. I suppose it could be worse, we could be plagued by, say, tigers. But no, its been nothing but crickets all the way down and I will go insane.
I have so many pleasant memories growing up of summer evenings and the quiet chirping of field crickets. The operative word here being quiet. I remember the field crickets chirp chirp chirp in the backyard and I remember the story that if you counted as many chirps as the cricket made in 17 seconds and added 35 then you could calculate the temperature, or something like that. The few times I tried it the temperature was usually something like 165 degrees, which explains why I am now a writer and not a mathematician.
Out here in California we have two kinds of crickets, the kind that go eeeeeeeeeeeeee and the kind that go cheep cheep cheep. And it was the kind that go eeeeeeeeeeeee that woke me up at 3AM the other night and kept me awake for a good hour and a half.
When people come up to our house to visit they always comment: its so quiet. If you’re used to the city you get used to the ambient noise: car noise, train noise, people noise, noise noise noise all around you. There’s none of that up here; on still days you can hear the freeway three miles away and sometimes you can hear a motorcycle go by on the road. But mostly it is completely still. But that means that you become sensitive to small noises. Like crickets. LOUD CRICKETS going EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in the middle of the night.
Its not just the crickets that bother me. I’ve also had trouble with the frogs. We have a hot tub, which makes for the biggest frog singles bar in the neighborhood, and when the frogs get going the noise (RIBIT RIBIT RIBIT RIBIT) is deafening. And then there’s the deer. Deer have this kind of pastoral reputation, an image of stepping delicately (and silently) through the sun-dappled trees. What they don’t tell you is that the noise deer make is GROOONNNNNK, a sort of hideous constipated brontosaurus sound that makes you bolt up from your chair in horror in the belief there’s something horrible coming out of the woods after you. Between all this and the raccoons you may wonder why we don’t just move back to the city. At least there we could get broadband internet and a burrito.
But back to the crickets. It was a hot night and the cricket was somewhere just outside the window, going EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE at 3 in the morning. I was awake for a long time, thinking that surely this was just ambient noise and I could just get back to sleep. But then the cricket would stop. And then start again. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. pause. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. argh.
Finally I got up and put in ear plugs. I keep ear plugs around for storms and to take with me to hotels. I don’t really like wearing them because they make me feel like my ears are bleeding, but if its a choice between that and not sleeping I’ll take bleeding from the ears any time. Fortunately, the earplugs were effective in blocking out the cricket. Unfortunately, they were also effective in blocking out the clock radio.
The next (late) morning brought an additional surprise: There was another cricket in the spare room. This was a cheep cheep cheep kind of cricket, and it was very happy. cheep cheep CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. I had breakfast and coffee and then armed with a flashlight I went looking for the cricket.
The secret to finding a cricket is patience. If you come too close to the cricket the cricket will stop cheeping. So you have to follow the noise until it stops, then stop moving until it starts again, and then slowly keep moving toward the CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP until you narrow in on the noise. Cricket marco-polo. Unfortunately, unlike eastern field crickets which are a good inch long and black and shiny, western crickets are only about half an inch long and greyish, so they blend in with the background of just about everything they sit on. Finding them is a challenge (the ones that go eeeeeeeeeeeee are bright green, which makes them easier to find). Do not ask me how they get into the house; this I do not know.
This particular cricket yesterday took me about twenty minutes of marco-polo to track down. He was lurking in between two boxes and I had to rattle around a lot to find him. After I had spied him, however, it was a simple matter of snagging him with a water glass and a post-it note and releasing him outside, where I’m sure he will meet up with his eeeeeeeeeeee friend to bother my sleep again tonight.
They say that crickets in the house foretell riches and good luck. Now that would be nice.
You can’t make coffee without a coffee grinder. Well, OK, you can, but then how could you live with yourself. Coffee grinder: essential to life. Electricity, running water, coffee grinder. I recently had to purchase yet another coffee grinder, and I found myself this morning thinking about coffee grinders I had known as I made a big cup of coffee this morning. Now, see, this is why weblogs are so important. Without a weblog, I would have to actually go outside and do something of value with my life rather than sit here in front of the computer and share all my knowledge about coffee grinder design with you.
Pros and cons of various coffee grinders I have known:
Various Krups/Braun cheapo coffee grinders. Cost: $15-20.
The best thing about the seemingly interchangeable Krups and Brains, er, Brauns (brains! Braiiins!! ahem) is that they are way cheap and they work well. They grind quickly and evenly, although it helps to pulse them if you grind for espresso.
There are also a bunch of problems with the cheapos, though. The most annoying one is that they cannot be easily cleaned, leading to lax behavior and buildup of yucky coffee goo on interior surfaces. More troubling: they break after a year or two, either by burning out the motor or by shredding small bits of plastic into your coffee. Mmmm. Of course they are so cheap that if they break you just throw them out and buy another one.
Gaggia Burr Grinder. Cost: $90.
Burr grinders are supposedly better for coffee because they don’t heat the beans when they grind them. I can’t taste the difference. But the price: ouch. If you can taste the difference, perhaps this will be more important to you and worth the investment. I recommend a burr grinder other than THIS one, though. What this particular grinder does very well is it charges all the grinds with static electricity, which means that when you pull the coffee ground container away from the grinder, all the coffee grounds go poof into the air and stick to your skin, the counter, your spoon, the grinder, the sides of the container etc, everywhere but stay in the pot or the filter where they belong. And you are left angry and uncaffienated and $90 poorer.
Also: Cannot be cleaned, which means there is usually a strange stale coffee smell in the hopper at all times. Also: chute leading from grinder to grounds container is poorly designed and ground coffee builds up there. Have you noticed: I really dislike this coffee grinder.
KitchenAid Blade Coffee grinder Cost: $30.
Bought this one last week when the last Krups died. Comes in fetching colors. Is kind of slow to grind compared to the Krups; it’ll take 20-30 seconds as opposed to 10-15 for the same amount of beans. Its louder, too. Will frighten pets. The cover fits loosely, which means there’s usually a bit of a mess to clean up. Buy a dark one.
But the really nice thing about this model: the metal grinder part with the blade is detachable from the motor so it can be cleaned easily — it can be tossed in the dishwasher or just run under the faucet. Its much easier to get into the habit of cleaning the thing when it can actually be easily cleaned. I like this one a lot and I have had good luck with other kitchenaid appliances (mixers, blenders, food processors), so I am hopeful that it will last. Plus: colors.
In summary: Cheap == good. Cleanable == good. Colors == good. Coffee == good. Thank you.
I am starting to develop an unhealthy fascination with vending machines.
At the company I formerly worked at there was the giant ice cream sucker machine. I loved this thing. Here we had normal chest freezer, filled with ice cream bars of various kinds arranged in neat rows and columns. The entire chest freezer was encased in a vending machine with a glass front. When you chose an ice cream bar, the vending machine would spring to life, an arm would reach out and open the chest freezer, revealing the ice cream. And then a vacuum hose would zip out from the corner, move to the location of your ice cream of choice, suck up your ice cream bar , move to the front of the machine, and drop it into the slot.
A vacuum hose! How cool is that! I bought ice cream way more than I should have at that job (at $1.75 a pop) just so I could watch the ice cream sucker operate. (yes, if you must ask, I AM easily amused).
Today at the company I’m currently working at I discovered the big soda bottle shoving machine. This is a soda machine that dispenses 20 oz plastic soda bottles ($1.10). The machine is at least twice the size as any other vending machine. In the main part of the machine there are rows and rows and rows of 20 oz bottles, all on display behind the glass. I put in my cash and selected my elixir of choice. I had expected the bottle to just drop into the open slot at the bottom like all vending machines work. But NO. With a loud mechanical noise the slot itself — a metal track — moved up to the appropriate row, and then paused. And then my bottle was SHOVED out the slot with a pop and fell sideways into the track. The track moved back down to the bottom of the machine where I could reach in and get my bottle. How considerate: since the bottle only had a little ways to fall when I opened it I did not spew soda all over myself. Cool.
I really wonder how sucessful these rube-goldberg-like vending machines are compared to your normal average vending machine. Do they sell more? Do they have to be repaired more? Of course for most normal vending machines I never see the inside — press a button, stuff comes out the slot at the bottom — so they could be even more complex and hard to fix and these vacuum hose and moving slot machines are actually LESS complex. They’re definitely more fun to watch.
But of course I have to mention the snack machine with the goddamn spiral dispensers. Ideally one puts one’s money in, the spiral bit turns, and one’s snack drops down to the slot, moving all the other snacks forward in the process. Of course it never happens this way. The spiral bit turns and your snack gets stuck there, hanging by one tiny corner right in full view but still refusing to drop. There’s a big sign on the machine with the international sign of a man getting squished by a vending machine that says “DO NOT ROCK” but you do it anyhow, and even solicit the help of some co-workers to jolt the machine around, but still no such luck. You’re doomed. Should have used the ice cream sucker.
I long ago stopped trying to rock these machines and instead I bolt back to my office for more change. And here usually one of two inevitable things happens. One: some co-worker scumbag comes by while I’m off gathering more change and buys my hanging snack out from under me. Scumbag. Two: I put in my second change, the spiral turns, the first snack drops, and then THE SECOND ONE STICKS. ARRGGGHHHH.
There was one afternoon where I ended up with one hanging bag of M&Ms, and then a second one, and then I got so irked by the whole thing I bought the whole goddamned row because it stopped being about having the munchies and it was about the PRINCIPLE of the thing.
Should have used the ice cream sucker.
