Carolyn Erickson

Why yes, yes I did.

And since I’ve been trying to figure out what is wrong with my Internet connection (is it a router issue? a cable modem issue? the line in from my isp?), I haven’t had a moment to even think about what I’m going to post.

Hmm. Here’s what’s on my mind today. I apologize in advance if it seems scattered and maybe even pointless. I promised a Post a Day in the Month of May, and I’m going to keep that promise!

This summer, I want to be caught up on most of my regular assignments so that I don’t find myself saying, “Just a minute, just a minute” to my daughter every day.

Not all freelance writers take summers off or reduce their workload. I do. For now. Because I can, and because I want to. I don’t see myself completely quitting during the summer, nor do I think I’ll do this for every summer for the rest of my child-raising years, but I really miss her and the time we used to have to learn and play together.

Besides that, parenting is one of my niche topics, so I can view this as “gathering material.” Oh, and not only can I gather material, when I’m not on deadline I usually find that I write more. I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Some of the best things I’ve written happened when I was just goofing around on the word processor. I love that.

I also love writing on assignment though - the challenge of making a new topic my own and getting to do interviews with fabulous people. So before the summer is out, I’ll probably be chomping at the bit for new assignments.

This approach of taking summers off and making my household responsibilities a priority over work priorities does slow down my progress on the career path. I know this and I know the potential consequences. I have looked everything over and decided that for me, the other consequences - missing out on what I’ve always wanted to do - are bigger.

Oh, and just so you don’t misunderstand - I’m not a participant in the alleged Mommy Wars. Where I live, you do what you need to do and what you think is best. I’m not critical of another mom’s choices. In fact, I truly admire women who handle so many things at once. But I know my own limitations as well as my own preferences. This life, the way I am living it? It’s the way I want it to be. How many people can say that? You better believe I’m going to enjoy it.

This totally random post is brought to you from the inner recesses of the writer’s mind. Author is not responsible for coherance or incoherance contained herein. (LOL. Okay, yeah, I am responsible for it.)

I do. I really, really do. (*Sally Field voice* … and while we’re on the subject, have you seen her? It’s enough to make you want to start taking Boniva. Or slathering it on as night cream. Or something.)

 Anyway, I do love interviews. I didn’t grow up wishing I could be an interviewer someday, but it’s a surprisingly fun part of being a writer. Of course, if my parents and career-counselors had been paying attention, they might have gotten a clue that this is the career for me when “talks too much in class” kept showing up on my report cards every year.

There are lots of reasons to love interviews:

* Have trouble getting your kid to sleep at night? Start an article and call up the biggest expert in the country who has a new book out and ask them what you should do.

* Want to know whether raw chicken is more likely than pre-packaged salad to have Salmonella germs? Call someone. Do an article.

* Wonder if that work-at-home company with the late-night infomercials is scamming innocent retirees out of thousands of dollars? Pitch a story, then go behind the scenes and start talking to people.

Even when an interview is on a subject you thought you have no interest in, listening to someone talk passionately about it makes it interesting.

And of course, listening is actually more important to interviewing than talking. And I’m a great listener, because being a great listener is SO easy. All it requires is asking a question and then shutting up. That doesn’t take much skill, and makes people remark about what an excellent conversationalist you are.

But this is what I’m getting at: Normally I leave an interview feeling quite jazzed and the article starts to formulate in the chemistry of my brain while I pat myself on the back for being a real pro at listening and getting a lot of good information. But recently I’ve discovered something that makes me, as Monk would put it, “L-O-L out loud.” (Please, USA Network, hurry up with new Monk episodes. I’m so desperate I’m starting to blog about it.)

Anyway, I’ve had two interviews recently that just I just didn’t seem to wrap up tightly as usual. I was mildly uncomfortable with my performance as an interviewer, just felt like I hadn’t been at the top of my game. At first I was stymied about what caused this blip in my usually productive process. The experts were pleasant and helpful - it wasn’t that. I had prepared my questions and done my research so it wasn’t that either. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t gotten the information I needed. So what was it?

And last night, in the peaceful, hazy rambling that the mind does as you’re just drifting off to sleep, the answer plopped up to the surface like a bobber does when you’ve lost the 100 pound Bluegill you will forever swear you had hooked. (Yes, that Bluegill was 100 pounds if it was an ounce. I swear it.)

Both of these strangely off-kilter conversations had been with people who counsel other people. One is a psychologist and career counselor and the other is a life coach. More than once during each of the conversations, when I did my usual “Oh I know what you mean because I’ve had that happen” thing, both of them stopped in the middle of their answer and asked me a question - something along the lines of, “And in what way did that challenge you?”

I would stammer and flub about and try to explain my comment and try to get back on track to listening once more. This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about me, but it was so… so tempting to rattle on about myself and have them say, “um-hmm, um-hmm,” and ask me leading questions until I got to the root of my issue and mapped out a plan of action for accomplishing what I was put on this earth to do.

I thought I was good. But these people, as my daughter would say, are even gooder.

  I have to admit something to you, because they say that is the first step. The first step in what? I don’t know. But I’m sure it’s important. So here goes:

I have a fear of Lacrosse. Actually not of the sport itself, but of trying to say something relevant and meaningful about it, because all I know about Lacrosse is that it is a sport. (I’m not even sure if I should be capitalizing it like I am.)

Since I’m trying to work plugs for my fellow blogathoners into each of my posts before the month is out, I knew I needed to say something.

Needless to say, I’ve been dreading this one a little. But after finally visiting Barb Adamski’s Lacrosse Blog, I can say this:

Those pictures she links to are really, REALLY cool. And the YouTube video she posted on May 9 (can’t seem to directly link to it) gives me the impression this is a high-energy sport of the kind that leaves moms like me thinking, “With all those sticks swinging around somebody’s bound to get hurt.”

The music in the video is pretty awesome too.

So there you have it. I no longer need to worry about Lacrosse. Thanks, Barb, for helping me stare down that fear.

Amy Grisak over at Living in Season provided some great early-season flower planting tips. Although I know enough about gardening to read the back of a seed packet, I wasn’t entirely sure I had planted the right varieties. Thanks to Amy’s blog, I discovered that most of my choices were good. Yay! (Note: If you really want to be jealous of Amy, check out her herb harvest. The basil in particular looks like something out of a magazine. Hmm, wonder why?)

Earlier this year, I wrote an article on living “green” - in other words, environmentally friendly. The premise of my article was that even people like me can make small changes to become better stewards of our environment. One of the things I learned while researching that article is that I can re-use shredded paper as mulch.

So in the interests of recycling, I ended up with this: 

Not pretty, but not a bad way to put those query rejections to good use. (To be honest, I’ve only ever been rejected by email. Those shreds more likely came from last year’s insurance policy.)

On top of the shredded paper, I’ll dump our used coffee grounds. And on top of that, when the plants get a little bigger, I’ll try to lay newspaper around them for weed control. Also not very pretty. (I’ll probably break down and buy some wood chips.)

But it will probably look prettier than bare dirt, which is what I have in the front flowerbed. Poor little portulacas; they’ve survived hail and high winds since I transplanted them from the safe and warm greenhouse out into the cruel, cruel world.

At least the hosta is thriving after I took pity on it and transferrred it to new digs. Actually, what was once one big hosta is now 4 healthy hostas. I was able to split and transplant them because I saw it done on The Victory Garden.

Because I am a notorious tightwad, I’m going to start with the money involved in roasting coffee.

The Cost

The last time I bought a pound of fancy coffee from the specialty store it cost me $8.95. Today I checked prices online and Starbucks sells a pound of their Organic Sumatra ~ Peru Blend for $13.95.

My husband purchases green (as in unroasted) Sumatra Gayo Mountain organic coffee beans for $2.60 per pound. The price includes shipping. No kidding.

And while buying beans from a specialty coffee retailer is probably fresher than buying a can of the already-ground stuff, some home-roasting afficianados estimate the beans may have been in the bags for at least 4 months. That’s not very fresh.

Okay, so the beans are not nearly as expensive and probably fresher, but what about the equipment? Will you need to take out a small loan and purchase an abandoned factory to brew your own?

The Equipment

Don’t laugh. My husband started roasting coffee in the garage using hot-air popcorn poppers.

Okay, go ahead and laugh a little. I laughed when he first described this method to me. But I quickly sobered up when I had the first cup of coffee he made this way.  It was fantastic.

He’s graduated from popcorn poppers to the more elegant Behmoor 1600, a roaster with a one-pound capacity and a smoke-suppressing design. (This model can supposedly be used indoors, with a little help from the stove’s exhaust fan. DH tells me this would work for a light roast, but in our dark-roast-loving household the machine is banned to the garage.)

We love our Behmor, but it is certainly not the only alternative for serious coffee snobs. Some do it over the stove with a Whirly-Pop and others use a cast-iron skillet and a wooden spoon. Some use heat guns and a dog bowl! Some guys my husband knows of have converted their gas grills into coffee-roasters and yet others have rigged up computerized controls for their air-poppers like this.  DH says some of these guys are genius inventors and some of them are nuts!

Before you break out the welding equipment though, you might check here or here for other coffee roasting machines. If you don’t have a garage, look for roasters with smoke-suppressing features and fire up that exhaust fan on the range hood.

The Beans

  Obviously, they’re going to need to be green. You may be able to find a local coffee shop that sells green coffee beans, but if not, the Internet provides a bevy of options. My DH recommends Burman Coffee Traders from personal experience, but says that Sweet Maria’s is also a very reputable site.  

According to my husband, a pound of green beans after being roasted and ground yields approximately 13 to 14 ounces of coffee, so you’ll want to buy accordingly.

The Know-How

Before you fire up the poppers of course you’ll want to make sure you know what you’re doing. There are terms like “first crack” and “cupping” I hear my husband tossing around. You’ll want to know them too. Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library is full of useful information (including more about the various methods of roasting coffee) along with photographs and illustrations. It also includes a long list of links to other sources online and in print. Michael Prince is the Coffee Geek and his other site, CoffeeKid, has more information than you ever thought you needed to know about brewing, roasting, and enjoying coffee and espresso.

And if you have a question, check out the Green Coffee Buying Club or Coffee Geek forums or the Australia-based Coffee Snobs forums. You’ll find likeminded coffee snobs from around the world, with suggestions for just about any situation that could arise with home roasting. Lurk a while and see if you can find some sort of consensus or discover who the more knowledgeable members are. Because you know what opinions are like.

The Time Investment

Once you know what you’re doing, roasting a pound of coffee from start to finish with the Behmor 1600 takes about 30 minutes. With the popcorn-popper method, you could probably do it in about an hour and a half. The time will be proportionately less if you use multiple poppers. (My husband can’t give an exact estimate, because being a contractor and over-achiever, he had as many as 4 poppers running on 4 different circuits at one time.)

Did I leave anything out? For me, the fun part is waking up to it every morning.

Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. - Proverbs 31:30 (KJV)

And the Amplified Version:

Charm and grace are deceptive, and beauty is vain [because it is not lasting], but a woman who reverently and worshipfully fears the Lord, she shall be praised!

The Strong’s definition of vain is “vapour, breath.” And one of the definitions for praised is “to shine.” (The word halal can also have a negative connotation, as in boasting, but that clearly is not the implication here.)

Beauty is fleeting. It’s wonderful, but not lasting. There is a much higher standard by which we women can judge ourselves (and speaking as a mother of two wonderful, grown stepsons, a standard by which young men can judge prospective spouses). A woman who reverences the Lord shines with a beauty that does not dim.

Sweet! Because I’m getting a little gray. 

Like: “Enjoy them while they’re at this age. They grow up so fast.”

And: “On your deathbed you probably won’t say, ‘If only I had spent more time at work.’”

The overuse of these sentiments dulls the effect of an otherwise penetrating truth: carpe’ diem. (Sorry, couldn’t resist one more cliche’.) But they became overused because a whole bunch of people saw the meaning in them. Can you think of a new way to say the same thing? Here’s my attempt:

Today is Saturday, May 10, 2008. Today, think about what you’re working toward and whether you’ll still want it when you get it.

And then, for a moment, stop to enjoy what you already have.

That’s what I’m doing today.  It makes work all the more enjoyable. I hope you have a great Saturday!

In the comments of my last post, Charmian asks how my husband roasts his own coffee. Thanks Charmian! I had no idea what I was going to post today.

First, I can tell you there is no need for dread. Roasting coffee probably won’t cost more than buying overpriced lattes at a coffee shop, and you’ll have better coffee. It also doesn’t require too much in the way of space.

I’ll have to interview my husband for the particulars (and he is particular) about where to get the best equipment, information, and coffee beans. (I hope to have links here on Monday.) But here’s a brief overview of the process:

My husband buys beans through a coffee-buying club, and owns a small roaster, which we set up in the garage. (In my opinion, you do not want the smoke and flying chaff inside your house!) After roasting, he cools the coffee in wire-mesh colanders and then puts it into non-airtight containers to let it breathe (or something). Then he transfers the beans to airtight containers, and we grind them fresh for every pot.

As I said in the comments, I highly recommend home-roasting as a hobby for husbands everywhere. (Mmm.)

Lest I give you the wrong impression, we do receive frequent shipments of green beans on our doorstep. And we have dropped quite a bit of cash into this hobby. But we’ve solved a problem in the process: once upon a time, none of us in the family knew what to give DH for birthdays and holidays. Now we do.

And it’s a gift that gives back.

Charmian Christie Charmian Christie has a delightful blog about the goings-on in her kitchen – food she’s making, gadgets she’s trying out, and even a dramatic saga about whisky called “As the Barrell Turns.” (How does she get her friends and loved ones to pose for those cute pictures?)

I don’t consider myself much of a foodie, and yet I probably spent over an hour there reading the posts. Growing up, I had no time for the kitchen; I was busy reading books. It wasn’t until maturity knocked me over the head with a rolling pin that I realized I should graduate from the can opener and microwave and learn how to make things.

I started with a basic herb-roasted chicken, which came out of the oven absolutely perfect. I was amazed that all I had to do was open a book with pictures and follow the numbered steps and I could produce something delicious and impressive.

The next big challenge was what they call gravy in the South and Béchamel on the Food Network. What starts off as a weird lumpy mixture of butter and flour becomes – well, so many things. Alton Brown did a whole show on gravy. It’s that important.

I moved to breads and pie crusts. (Homemade French bread tastes 32,000 times better than store-bought. And the best part? Casually working into the dinner conversation that it’s homemade, thusly: “Oh, how is it? I might have let it get too warm during the second rise.”)

And did you know you can make yogurt? Recently I made yogurt after writing an article about food safety. That’s a job hazard right there. As I’m cooling the milk to just the right temperature I realize I’ve got my own little bacteria factory.

They’ll tell you not to bake bread on the same day that you make yogurt because the yeast stymies the growth of the cultures. I can tell you right now I’m never going to need that information. Are there actually people who make homemade yogurt AND bread on the same day?

Now for my picture, since I’m trying to be like Charmian, who is as talented with a camera as she is with butter tarts. This isn’t something I make, but I enjoy it every day – my husband roasts all of our coffee, using the best green coffee beans from around the world. Every morning is a geography lesson while I sip the hot black brew du jour. If you are jealous, you should be. He makes the best coffee. Here’s a picture of the beans cooling after being roasted:

And that monstrosity behind the coffee beans? That’s one reason NOT to be jealous, I guess. That’s our restaurant-grade espresso/cappuchino maker taking up half of my counter space. On the other hand, it does make great espresso and we can have it any time of the day or night, so yeah. I should be thankful.

Because of the proliferation of online networking, it seems everyone has a profile bio these days - a 20 to 40-word description that encapsulates who they are and what they do. (Some clever folks have done it well in 6 words.) I know I need one too, but I’ve struggled to concisely describe myself (probably because I’m just too close to the subject).

Another reason I really, really need a profile to use online is because there are so many other people online with my name! (I’ll wait while you Google. JK)

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not complaining. I’m happy to be in such good company. The women who share my name are quite accomplished. But I need, in the interests of full disclosure I think, to differentiate myself from them. So here’s the bio I wish I could write for myself:

Carolyn Erickson is a licensed psychologist, university physics professor, West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran. And I am not any of them.

That’s 23 words. What do you think?