Friday morning coffee... A person could easily get spoiled by these cool morning temperatures. A bit of haze in the air, dew on the grass, a almost full moon hanging high in the shy... birds singing on all sides... I couldn't ask for a better way to start a day.…
Thursday morning coffee...It's another cool morning here on the back porch. The humidity is back... which is paradoxical because it not only makes the afternoons feel hotter, it also makes these cool mornings feel cooler... but, then again... it could just be the ceiling fans. This morning started off with…
Wednesday morning coffee... caught the sun rise this morning. I got out early to try for a bit more quiet before work started next door. Shot this video first thing and managed to catch the moment the light hit the trees. From the silence on the video it seems there…
Tuesday morning coffee... it's another cooler than normal day for June. The birds were in fine form right up until they were overshadowed by the sounds coming from the construction site 500 ft away. 7:30 came way too early for my taste, I was still enjoying my back porch time.…
https://youtu.be/lnRRDSYgdmw Aaron Franklin has become my goto person when it comes to improving my smoking of big chunks of meat... It was probably his use of a small backyard smoker in his video series that convince me to replace my old rusted out charbroiler with a Old Country. So far,…
Monday morning coffee and the day is cool and bright. The sky from the back porch is blue from horizon to horizon without a single blemish. Our resident hawk passes over low, scoping out the possibilities for breakfast, while silencing the ever present bird chorus for the moment. I hear…
Sunday morning coffee is always so peaceful on the back porch. No traffic sounds from the bypass up the road. Just the birds (and this year... the frogs in the woods out back) singing their borders for all to hear. The cool front keeps trying to push through... that gets…
Yesterday, while trolling through the many folders on my hard-drive, I stumbled across the xml WordPress export file that I used back in 2013 to move Coffee Muses to a new host... So thanks to that, I am only missing the few posts I put up in the past two…
Saturday morning coffee... there is a crew working just over the the city limit line (about 500' away). They have been at it since a bit after seven. I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't for the OSHA mandated backup alarm on their forklift... When you are listening to…
I guess since this is a rebuild of the original, I suppose I should explain the name of this site. Way back in May of 2006 I started a blog I called North Carolina Mountain Dreams at WordPress.com. Over the course of that first year I noticed a lot of…
Friday morning coffee is cool and damp with a bit of un-forecasted rain moving through. At least, the weather underground was not expecting it. Rolling waves of thunder got me out of bed. And watching the clouds roll by to their bass rumble was not a totally unpleasant way to…
Thursday morning coffee and the sun is out, the humidity is ridiculous, and there is a faint odor of rotting vegetation in the air. Green lizards scamper across the porch at my feet. Bluebirds flutter down in front of me, stealing bugs from the lizards, while cardinals sing from multiple…
I tried to see if the Wayback Machine had the very first Coffee Muses post... It seems the earliest they captured was from Jul 13 2007. Here is what was occupying my mind way back then: Well, I meandered thru my email, read the headlines and opinions of the paid…
I find myself spending a bit more time on the back porch today. For some reason the temperature is still below 70. It has made for a while pleasant morning of breezes and bird songs... now of only we could get a break from the raining weather! I kept trying…
https://youtu.be/XDGbnwdJ-Wk Originally Posted to Facebook
Again... A funny thing happened on the (almost) eighth anniversary of this site/blog... I managed to accidently delete my database. So basically everything I had posted here... kind of like, went away. And since I had been ignoring this place anyway... And all of the links in my old posts…
With Ben Folds and Nick Hornby... Yeah. http://youtu.be/6G5JaicYuVU
I had spent the week watching the weather forecast. A week ago they were forecasting fog for the day. By Monday the forecast had a 70% chance of rain. By Tuesday the chances were up to 80% and it was looking like a washout. But tradition is tradition. So I loaded…
Yesterday my wife came home with a passel of worries about Obamacare. She wanted me to go online and find out if what she had been told was true. It seems one of her coworkers had heard something on the radio that had her worried. There was talk about the IRS, an…
Everyone lives with self mythology. The more important a memory is to the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the more often we rehearse the memory. And the more often we relive those memories, the less likely it is that they are true. via Seth's Blog: A legend in my…
I keep coming back to the fact that this has been one of the gloomiest winters I can remember. We seem to have been stuck in the overcast since Thanksgiving. Just a day (or at most two) of sunshine each week or so. The only brightness in my days are…
When we go out, we carry some warmth into the night, and when we come in, we carry some cold into the house, a vanishingly small exchange of energy in a universe of such extremes. Verlyn Klinkenborg via Zero in the Dark - NYTimes.com.
We have fallen into the Texas Gulf Coastal winter weather pattern I remember from my youth...Overcast and damp...Cool and breezy... Just generally dreary all day every day. Though, I must say, after a few years of less than optimal rainfall patterns, a bit of dreary misty, rainy weather is appreciated.…
Mark Bittman makes the point in his column at the New York Times today, that the biggest killer of Americans isn't guns but industrial agriculture. A point I have made repeatedly with my family over the years. ...the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture,…
The recent discovery of several instances of “the whole six yards” in newspapers from the 1910s — four decades before the earliest known references to “the whole nine yards” — opens a new window onto “the most prominent etymological riddle of our time,” said Fred Shapiro, a librarian at Yale…
Now that we have baked our cookies and trimmed our trees,now that we have wrapped our gifts and planned our dinners,now that we have hung stockings, sent greetings and set tables,assembled toys, trimmed wicks, written Santa and hung wreaths,the time has come to abandon it all,if only for a moment.Hallelujah…
... That Person From High School Who Was Always In A Band? While he really didn't go to my high school, it was at a high school dance that I met him when his band was performing. He was a friend of a friend. We lived in Pasadena and he…
The other day I linked to a post by Mary Jaksch at her blog write to done where she was having a conversation with Seth Godin. Today she continues that conversation. The following interaction really resonated with me. It explains why I follow the people I do online in the most succinct way I have seen…
I started reading Gene Logsdon by in my younger "hippie" days. I would bet I still have a few of his books on the bookshelf somewhere in the house. I still follow his blog. He just posted this piece... I have a hunch that the following scene happens only on…
I stumbled across this today at the Washington Post. I almost didn't follow the link. But, I did and all I can say is... Wow... This is awesome. You must have seen thousands of photographs of Everest. But there have been none like this: (Click to see the panoramic image…
