i spent a good part of yesterday going through my old daylogs, for two reasons. Partly I wanted a list summarising them all (I used to have such a list on my homenode, but it got killed off due to my using unapproved Unicode characters =[). The other thing is that I've wanted to document my coming to America, and my relationship with Christine and Tess, so I could point people to that collection of writings. That category, The life and times of grundoon, is getting to be almost complete; I still need to add in some of Christine's own writings on her progress through cancer and the treatments. In part, this is to tell the story of how we met, but also document the growing love that we shared, and how the three of us (grundoon, myself and Tessie) managed this dreadful seven-year journey by just loving one another.

Tips for getting the best from your café and barista

Baristas work bloody hard. It's a skilled job as you'd find out if you had to juggle making hundreds of drinks a day, all day, every day. Pulling an excellent espresso shot alone takes time and practice to learn,. Add in a wide variety of drinks based on espresso and you'll see there's a lot to balance and think about, not to mention the hideous and innumerable matcha concoctions that are suddenly

I'm on my hands and knees, looking at the strange accretion of living growths that have begun to sprout from the ground in the shade around the base of a strange black boulder the size of my pickup truck. The boulder is the largest of several in a small clearing in what I think of as the jungle. The growths, almost like ferns but somehow plump and wet like fungus, are pinky-orange and sit entirely within the drip-line surrounding the tiny overhang of the boulder