weekend distraction: re-reading Alice

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is so good every time. One of those books I seem to be always reading, always re-reading. Published in 1865, which I find incredible.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

“You used to be much more…”muchier.” You’ve lost your muchness.”

“Curiouser and curiouser!”

“Be what you would seem to be- or, if you’d like it put more simply- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

“It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying, ‘Come up again, dear!’ I shall only look up and say, ‘Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up — if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’ — but, oh, dear!”

Ah. I want a crown. And an apron, too.

on the menu: Paradise Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Kochere coffee

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Trying coffees that sound appealing, most often those that claim to taste of caramel. For the last few weeks, this one from Paradise Roasters.

This didn’t really come through on the caramel front, at least not in the aeropress (and if not there, where?). Light*  and sour with some tangy citrus element that was maddeningly familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it (and it faded over time, eluding me). Not artichoke but something like artichoke. It isn’t love this time, Paradise. [I do really like your Romance blend, though.]

*Which I like – a dark roast is too much for me for these relatively early forays into coffee drinking, and probably too much for me altogether, comic levels of dilution aside.

Deciding today what to try next. I am not [yet] an avid coffee drinker but I want to drink enough to learn what I like, and what I like a lot.

I am in good company:

“Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”  – Balzac