Dump the Old Grounds

First call was at five.  I’ve an alarm set, just in case, but I know that I’ll be stirring around hours before that and not long after four I catch the note that the meeting has been postponed.  Next call is at seven and there’s one at eight, right after that, but now there’s time, the rarest of gifts.

When the calls are done, I go out take the end of yesterday’s coffee and pour it into a mug.  This goes up into the microwave for one minute of molecular manipulation.  Time was I though coffee tasted awful after nuking it.  Now I don’t seem to mind.  Dump the old grounds into the compost, toss the dirty paper filter and position in a new one.  Stop and Shop has Peet’s Coffee.  Major Dickason’s blend was something I first tried seven years ago in the lounge of a fast-moving tech startup, located right along 101 there in Silicon Valley, before this shop moved to Santa Clara.  Turns out Key Dickason was a customer of Peet’s who helped him design the blend.  Presumably he wasn’t one to nuke his coffee either.

Old, scalding coffee in hand, new resonant coffee at-the-brew, I head out to the porch between the kitchen and the garage and slip on my sneakers.  The automatic garage door opener breaks the morning’s silence and I consider the bird feeders at the base of the driveway.  Supply in the two feeders have dropped precipitously.   I’m not sure how much longer I’ll stock these.  I’m glad the birds enjoy them, but I don’t get to see much here.   Out in the back I put the woodpecker suet feeder back up.  I’d taken it in last night as the raccoon seems to think I’d left it there for him.  Before I head out into the yard, I take my cut-off gallon milk container and scoop up a half gallon of sunflower seeds which I’ll toss into an arc in the back. 

Tonight, the Age of Division, in our Chinese history class.  The Han dissolves into three kingdoms.  My daughters know all the main characters from the same-named drama, having watched one and then another serialized version of the story over the years.  China, before the Tang, might have fallen apart and become a southern Byzantium and a northern Catholic Christendom.  Christianity spreads across the formerly Roman world at much the same time that Buddhism spreads across the Middle Kingdom after the demise of the Han.  And where Charlemagne tried his best to fashion a united empire across Europe, he was no more successful that Napoleon or Hitler.  But that which is apart must eventually come together, as their ‘good book’ says and China is united by the Sui and held in unison by the Tang for the next three hundred years.

Tuesday, 06/09/20