I want some coffee!

#VanLife traveler Michael Beattie, fresh back from Mexico, caught this guy hangin' out waiting  for dinner. Check the original image on his Conchscooter blog for 26 June 2022 .     Well done Michael!

The Bullet coffee roaster still has place of honor in the shop!  What has happened is I discovered Mexico Organic Chiapas at Coffee Bean Corral in Jul 2020. Since then Chiapas has replaced everything else for roasting and I didn't want to keep saying the same-old same-old here on iwantsomecoffee .  In late-2019 thru mid-2020 I was obsessing about Ethiopia Organic Yirgacheffe. The Yirgacheffe is still a great choice but I don't get the same enthusiastic reaction from others as I do with the Chiapas. Not only are we 2 old toots happy with the Chiapas coffee I'm roasting, so too are the folks I share with.  Now life is a little simpler. I keep roasting the same kind of beans the same way. No variation cuz I've worked all the bugs out of the roast profile which is now migrated into a Recipe (automated commands which control the Bullet roaster temperature). And that makes for nothing much to write about. But that change in roasting habit did nothing to keep the Bullet's...

We are starting to get the RV ready. We delayed till our friends the road warriors (Michael & Layne) had returned from Mexico. Our park rules say we can't have our travel-RV on our lot at the same time as a visitor's RV. So we had to wait till after their departure for Clarkdale, Arizona. Once the lot was clear, however, I brought the Vegas out of the storage yard, parked it on our site and got busy. Well, OK... it was Lightning Fast RV Repair that got started. We had some uninvited visitors to the vent line for the fresh water tank. Looks to be a spider's nest; plus some mud daubers left us a few eggs embedded in (surprise! surprise!) mud. Made filling the water tank a nightmare as I had to keep stopping water flow to let the trapped air vent out via the fill line... Vent hose was home to first a spider's nest then mud dabbers laid a few eggs. A replacement piece of hose solved that issue plus Jeff fab'ed a custom piece of screen material to keep the critters f...

Seems like it happened over night, but the truth is the temps progressed from 'livable' to 'it's too damn hot' over several months. This slow onset of summer heat apparently prompted this bit of New Testament guidance from the Cowboy Church in Tombstone: Micheal & Layne, our friends from Key West who we know from our cruising/live-aboard days, returned from Mexico on Wednesday and we drove to Bisbee to meet them for lunch after Border Patrol & Customs finished with them. Seemed a good time for a late breakfast at the BBC... the Bisbee Breakfast Club. [Note to myself: biscuits and gravy after 1 PM is not a good choice; get the waffle or the blueberry pancakes!] M&L went off to Sierra Vista after lunch to pick up previously ordered 'stuff' then headed for our place at SKP Saguaro Co-op in Benson. So we have front yard guests for a few days as they get themselves ready for summer travel. Fair warning to anyone in the path from Benson to Santa Cruz- ...

Pretty much as expected, the AT&T service was easy-peasey and worked well. That is to say it worked as advertised. The box from Millenicom containing the router arrived about 2:30 Monday (note to Millenicom: a package isn't shipped till you actually get it shipped!). It was up and running by 2:32. I opened the box, found & installed the SIM card, plugged in the router's power adapter to the outlet and without doing a single thing it was connected to AT&T. Beginning to end was about 2 minutes. Setup effort was zero. Nada. So... 3 cheers for Millenicom and AT&T!! And most important we made it through two 51-minute episodes of Poirot without buffering one time. It just... worked!   Which wasn't a surprise as I had run Speedtest a few times to confirm all was well- Latency = 70 msec Download = > 20 MBps Upload = 1.1 MBps (terrible! may be a router-location issue) Next test will be to find a safe location on the Vegas and see how it does outside the park. An...

I loved the Skyroam concept but the implementation fell short of the miracle (!) it promised. So on 30 Apr I asked Millenicom, the Oregon-based service that re-sells Skyroam's world-wide internet access, to cancel the subscription before we hit another 30 day cycle.  Our experience was that we would be disconnected regularly- about 5 pm on Wednesday. Seemed to be the weekly anniversary of when we first activated the service. I'd call Millenicom and they would call Skyroam, then Skyroam would reconnect us. My sense of it was that Skyroam felt they were doing us a favor by reconnecting our router. Enough. And the support tech mentioned we weren't the only ones that had suffered regular disconnects. Our park-provided internet access here in Benson is still limited in bandwidth even with the significant drop in snowbirds who have left for their summer homes... whatever we're watching will have to buffer a few times before the episode/video is over. So I have now signed up f...

For the first time since we activated our service with Millenicom we were able to stream without interruption on a Wednesday evening. It wasn't till Thursday evening I realized we'd hit that milestone. So having missed the 'Rabbit! Rabbit!' moment on Wednesday evening I felt obliged to immortalize the event here.   And for the select few ignorant of a valued superstition Wikipedia has an article to save you from yourself! Update: less than an hour after posting this I discovered our Millenicom/Skyroam wireless internet service had crapped itself. Again. Well... at least I know they're reading my blog!