i moved!

to here

another incredibly nice weekend called me out to the alameda flea market on sunday! you actually have to go there by ferry, which is also my favorite thing about living so close to the bay. i wandered around there all day long in the sunshine, ate good food and learned about the flea market business. i got a pretty and blue enameled coffee pitcher (finally my pour turbulence over will be more controlled) and met many nice people. also, there was a vendor selling old illustrations from books and i got the a couple of really nice ones from the book all about coffee by william h ukers. it's available from google books here. have a wonderful coffee time!

cherries


i'm in love with this season! i don't know if it's the summer, my incredible cherry shopping skills, or just that i am supposed to be with cherries a lot these days, but i've had so many fabulous cherries lately. eating them plain - chewing and spitting out pits. yum!


problem solved here

i'm still in love with san francisco! i miss my friends and family in norway, but i feel so calm and happy about life here now. i bike downtown every morning, from my house in noe valley, past the ritual store in the mission, four barrel, rainbow grocery, down folsom and head into the alley that leads to the ritual roastery and doing it faster and faster. 


recently, i turned 30 and i was kind of down the afternoon before - but i soon realized that no matter how fake facebook friends are, they sure made me feel very very blessed on my birthday and the entire night before (i had already been 30 in norway for a while when i woke up on my real birthday). the day in itself was uneventful, ritual and i share the same birthday, and we were all kind of busy planning on the big party we were going to have in the alley the following saturday. but i got a mie(tte) cake, birthday song and flowers. i biked home that night, and and figured i was where i wanted to be. 


my birthday present for myself was nothing extravagant, but i thought i should have a little something i've wanted for a long time, so i ended up purchasing the $30 app mojotogo. i realize it's a $30 calculator, but i'm trying to make it worth it by using it to jam up my aeropressing. i know you're probably tired of me talking about it, but after all, there's the world aeropress championship coming up soon. ben will compete for me, since i can't go myself, and i am already getting excited! i assume there will be some sort of streaming of the event?



greetings from america! i am writing this, looking out at the american flag waving in the wind. a flag, that in the morning when i come out in the kitchen is pretty much covered in fog. so it's san francisco. in the past week, i've thought about many possible ways to start writing about my new life here in san francisco. about how and why. about expectations and disappointments. thinking of it, the most fascinating part might be how norwegian i've become. i watch norwegian television online. i am more than excited every time i see the brewery 'nøgne ø' (which is norwegian) present in beer stores with impressive selections of beers. i react in ways i thought i wouldn't on expressions of american culture. food. sports. like, why aren't they showing any norwegians when reporting from the winter olympics? why on earth is that tiger woods mishap still in the news? where is obama? no seriously. where is he? constantly critical, investigating, curious and impressed. 

i adore andreas viestad's book "the journey to cadillac". perhaps the most enjoyable part of it is it's various citations and insights about the american culture (he actually travels to cadillac, france, in a cadillac deville sedan 1969). in the book i read that the author celine had a belief that traveling was useful. it's an escape from whatever that is, or is not, at home. it can give you knowledge. it can expand your imagination. but, he was also of the opinion that for the most part, it leads to uncomfortable situations, egotism, hardships and disappointments.

i can't wait to have norwegian waffles in the norwegian sailor's church on sunday. until then: à la prochaine!


It might seem like quite some time since i had something in particular interesting going on in my head regarding coffee. But i have been thinking about interesting things and coffee a lot also since my last post. Mostly, the lack of posts are due to the new coffee people favourite thing - micro blogging - twitter. And I have honestly not spent so much time writing up blogposts, because the twitter universe has made it very easy to delve into subjects with links to other blog posts and articles about blog posts. Facing the diverse and burgeoning amount of blogs and articles has made me experience and contemplate the complexity of the field - the plethora of methodological decisions that coffee people that wants to be on top of things needs to face every day and the insane amount of time we spend to follow up on each other - what is going on today? every day.

It's almost Christmas, and I will spend it contemplating this year - which has rolled by faster than I could say Maracaturra. On New Years Eve, I am leaving Oslo for a while for San Francisco, which I think will be interesting and a learning experience. In particular, I am looking forward to learn more about extraction, a field of interest that is mostly overlooked by me. Not because I don't want to, but just because I'm not there yet. Not in 2009, at least. The multitude of alternative approaches to extraction has made explicitly this subject something I wish I knew more about - a coffee challenge that is not yet completed.

Merry Christmas, friends. And peace on earth.

Eldre innlegg