Great guide to making coffee in a french press

I'm not really a coffee drinker, historically just drinking diner coffee and sometimes when I go out for donuts. In the past year my coffee consumption has shot up, and I am now the proud owner of a french press. Here's how to use it.

So that's about a year

I started this blog a year ago tomorrow. I was in the midst of leaving my job at MIT and heading into a vast unknown territory west of the Mississippi and beyond the office environment and thought, correctly as it turned out, that having a practice of writing would help to anchor me. It hasn't quite been a daily practice, but I've averaged a little less than every other day of practice writing, poems, mini essays, observations, reviews, and the occasional photo. It's been a good year for writing for me, which is after all something I intensely enjoy and find satisfaction from. I haven't put this many of my ideas to page since the year or two out of college before my epistolary habits degraded into mere logistics and planning.

That said, its time for a change. My goals for this blog floated around for the first month or two and settled on giving myself space to write, to think in a more sustained way than Miriamcare regularly allows, and to keep myself in the practice of adult communication. In the past few months, an uptick in my professional work has helped to cover my need for adult communication and extended writing, at least professional writing. So I think I have space to play around with the blog. Over the summer, expect a little more experimentation in its format and focus. I hope at the end of the summer to settle into something new and more finely tuned than the at times unedited random musings I've sometimes posted here. Depending on where things go, there even may be a wholesale overhaul and a new blog, complete with new name, look, and tone to replace this one. As Ira Glass likes to say, stay tuned.

Every driver, every officer, every hero a woman

Big Machines
a board book

In which a pair of children and their dog go out for a walk and see a sequence of large machines, such as bulldozers, fire engines, cherry pickers, cranes, airplanes, and boats. Every character in the book is female, from the little girls to the drivers of the trucks to the firefighters to the pilot to the police officer directing traffic around a construction site. The art is in a brightly colored cartoony style with a simplified cityscape background, bright sunny day, and focus on the machines. Text to emphasize the machines and teach about what each is or does. Story ends with girls returning home and playing with toy trucks, machines, planes, etc.

Everything from this point forward is a bonus

I feel there's a trope in American literature and culture about the walking dead inhabiting a living afterlife. Think of a person or character who has had a near-death experience: been saved from suicide, or a walked away from a plane crash, or outlived a too short prognosis for certain death by cancer, who afterwards thinks of life as a bonus period, unexpected, blessed and unworldly. In my work as an engineering and science educator I teach kids to follow their curiosity and imagination and immense abilities to build and discover. The materials used in this are often cast-off toys and tools of other, better funded projects, or reused styrofoam trays, or decade-old computers, or the durable packaging and scraps from a construction site. These are things destined for the landfill and the recycling center, and I am able to pluck them out of their journey for a short living afterlife in a child's hands and mind's eye. Being already dead and not quite knowing it, such material doesn't mind if we cut through half a dozen pieces before getting the right shape. It is perfect stuff to hot glue together into little sculptures, whittle to become a shim or strut, be crushed under a pile of books carefully stacked up to see how much force it can take before cracking. And it call be swept into the dumpster without more than a twinge of guilt on the part of this particular recycling citizen.

Curvilinear Cardboard Construction

We have a big box in the living room this week as a little house and playroom for the toddler among us. With each passing day it gets a bit more decoration and gains new architectural feathers. There's a window cut high on one side, the french double doors on the other end and lots and lots of drawings, inside, outside, on ceiling and floor and walls. Becca devised a folding table in the corner out of two curves of cardboard, which when up help strengthen a substantially weakened structural integrity. The leftover material of the french doors forms a beautifully curved support to a little cantilevered roof.

Learn like a fox, teach like a hedgehog

As Isaiah Berlin playfully quoted, "The fox knows many little things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Originally talking about history and Tolstoy the sorting out of historians and philosophers, his quote has since been applied to all sorts of things. At least in my circle of college friends, since one of them is now (and probably was at the time) one of the world's leading scholars on Isaiah Berlin.

I did a bit of teaching this week and struggled a little to remember how to be a good teacher. I have not been in front of a class of students for about a year except in the most informal of settings. I tried to slow down, not just make my points and move to the next but to watch to see how each idea was absorbed. To emulate what each of the students, fourth graders or middle schoolers depending on the day, was thinking as I spoke and showed images and gave them materials to touch and manipulate. I tried to think of myself as the learner and to see all of the extraneous details in the room and in my room and examples that distracted from the big messages I wrote up at the top of the lesson plan. In a Montessori way, I wanted, though mostly failed, to give the core message and just that message. To talk about nanomaterials required talking about chemistry and plastics and consumer decision making and scientific notation and changing diapers and how oil can stain fabric and constant little details besides the day's big idea that materials' properties can change dependent on the scale of its composition, from macro to micro to nano.

Thinking as a learner, there were dozens of little tangents I could go out on, squirreling away knowledge bit by bit. Or putting it in my fox hole, as the case may be.

Actually enjoying poetry

I have rarely been much of a fan of poetry. But right now I have as bedtime reading The Poet's Corner, edited by John Lithgow. I looked it up after hearing his awesome rendition of Gertrude Stein's "If I told him" on Selected Shorts. The poets are quite familiar, Frost and Auden and Keats and Sandburg and such, and most of the poems are recognizable too. Mostly what makes them appealing is reading them outloud. I tend to skim when I read, which is fine for news (the fast is over) and novels but not so good for poetry. Saying each word means I read each word and I hear each word as I perform each word and make its meaning clear, both for my "audience," who are mostly asleep, and for myself. Also, perhaps, I'm older and wiser than in high school and college when last I read poetry.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cinnamon toast
lunch: leftover Ezra chickpea dish with alphabet pasta
dinner: homemade fettucini with broccoli, chicken thigh cutlets, spinach salad (Did I mention that I bought a folly's worth of baby spinach because the five pound bag was only five bucks? Luckily most of that is in the freezer now.