Category Archives: Lite

Tearing Down

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While doing the usual weekend chores last Sunday I bumped the vacuum cleaner into the table where my old computer and desktop used to be. Ever since my iPad and iPhone the location and nature of much of my computing tasks at home have radically shifted. I no longer spend such long hours sitting in front of a huge machine playing online games. Now I just use my phone to tend to email and read for the most part.

This change in how I use technology isn’t reflected in this room upstairs in my house that has for the most part been neglected. So there needs to be a reckoning. I need to sort through this area and pitch what has to be removed and generally de-clutter that part of my house. It feels a lot like a callus that has built up over time and it’s a kind of clutter that you don’t really see any more except when you run the vacuum cleaner into it. There is a general sense of simplification that appeals to me and this table full of wasted technology needs to be figured out.

Along with this I have five closet areas that need to be generally gunged. There is a coat closet on the ground floor that needs to be seriously organized, the guest room closet needs to be exhumed and dealt with, then all the upstairs closets need to be gone through. There are things I no longer need, want, or can use. Clothing, knick-knacks, and various orders of past debris that all need to be evaluated and sorted and organized.

This weekend I think will be a fantastic opportunity to address these situations, at least for as much as I can do on my own. We’ll see just how much progress I can make.

What's in a name?

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I have a Google Alert set to my name, “Andy McHugh” along with other terms like it and every once in a great while I’ll get traffic that the Google spider comes across that entertains me. This specifically gave me a terrible case of the giggles. It’s andymchugh.com.

I can’t help but wonder if he gets any cross traffic from all the outrageous things I post on the Internet. It’s one of the reasons why if someone does a simple name search they’re not going to find me. They are going to find the 8 Andy McHugh’s in Ireland, the 3 in England, and apparently a gaggle of us here in the States. Like this fellow. I have no idea who he is, but he’s got my name. I like to believe my middle name makes me unique, but I would bet money that over in Ireland there has to be an Andy McHugh with the middle name of Joseph. A batch of good Catholics, come on.

So anyways, it’s funny to notice my telemarketer-confusing last name out there in the world and really funny to see my name as a dot com. A part of me wants to write a comment on his site and say hello, but that may be just a smidgen stalkery.

Pu'erh Tea

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Ever since we have been going to Chocolatea in Portage I’ve been drinking more and more tea. I’ve written about this in the past a few times and I’ve discovered a lot and learned even more. I couldn’t have done any of this without the wonderful people down at Chocolatea who take great pride in teaching the public about tea and guiding you along the route to really enjoying all the teas they have to offer.

I’ve enjoyed a good number of teas, from the classic Earl Grey which was the first black tea I ever tried and really liked to various green teas and Oolong teas. Each varietal brings something I never expected to my cup. The greens are very light and easy to drink and very healthy for you – but then again, they ALL are. The Oolong teas are interesting because they are full-leaf teas and there is a Chinese method called “gong-fu” which is brewing tea many times. Most teas can take up to three infusions before they peter out, but Oolong can take it and enjoys up to seven or eight infusions with hot water for progressively longer steeps. The flavors that are expressed in each steeping shift from instance to instance which makes Oolong a very interesting tea to explore. I’ve kind of Oolong’ed myself out of that tea after drinking it for a long while and so I decided to get back on the warpath and explore more types. There are some other tea-like plants that you can make “teas” out of, Rooibos and Yerba Mate. The first is nice, but it lacks any caffeine which is okay for a right-before-bed tea but doesn’t give me the kind of kick that I need during the day. Yerba Mate has a caffeine-like substance that gives you a lift without feeling jittery. All of this I learned at Chocolatea and online.

Amongst all these teas, I’ve found one type that really knocks my socks off. I really enjoy drinking it and can drink it all day long. This tea is called pu-erh tea and I put five grams of leaves into my infuser basket and boil water and set it for no more than three minutes. This tea creates a very dark brew that looks a LOT like coffee. The scent of the tea is very earthy and the taste, well that’s something special. Pu-erh tea tastes like vanilla and caramel and brown sugar. This particular tea is called “Caramel Pu-erh” so that’s where the caramel notes come from, obviously. This tea is what I love about really great coffee without the bitter astringency that I really don’t like about coffee. I regard it as the coffee-drinkers tea and I bet that if I brewed a cup of this and gave it to my coffee-obsessed family that they would be blown away as much as I was when I first tasted it. Since that first time I’ve bought 2 ounces of this tea which costs about $3.85 per ounce. That’s about 56 grams of tea, for about 33 to 44 cups of really awesome coffee-without-the-bitterness. It has all the rich flavor that you want from coffee, a nice small kick of caffeine per cup, not to mention a bunch of unproven-but-maybe health claims ranging from numerous phenols which are antioxidants and good for you, to appetite suppression (caffeine) and even increased fat breakdown (in rats, it suppresses a metabolic pathway that leads to the formation of fatty acids and triglycerides). WebMD even went so far to claim that Pu-erh tea can sometimes contain Lovastatin which some think is naturally created by one of the fermenting microbes as the Pu-erh is manufactured. This lovastatin is apparently one of the drugs in cholesterol drugs that suppresses LDL cholesterol and enhances HDL cholesterol, so once again you have a maybe-claim to lowering the bad cholesterol and enhancing the good. There were other maybe-maybenots that pointed to antimutagenic properties and perhaps even anticancer properties. Is it true? I don’t know. I don’t think there could be a study in humans where you could control to that fine a detail in the right way to know one way or another. So it’s nice to think that this tea might have these great properties and that it certainly won’t do you any harm. With a taste like this, in the end who the hell cares? If it’s not bad for you, and tastes this good, then any other benefits are just gimmes.

Amongst all of these teas that I’m trying, thinking about my past and what I used to think about tea does make me feel a little chagrined. Tea was awful because it was of crappy quality in a really crappy delivery mechanism. It was designed to fail. A nice cup, such as a Bodum insulated borosilicate glass cup makes enjoying tea very convenient, an infusion basket for holding the leaves, and most importantly really great loose-leaf teas are a must. Considering how cheap the per-ounce price is from Chocolatea and how you can infuse most teas at least three times if not more, your bang-for-the-buck is huge. Plus you don’t need a coffee machine, expensive baskets, filters, or the silly beans or grinds that are all going to die in your pantry of age-related death because coffee, unlike tea, just can’t last in the long-haul.

As I explore more I’ll blog about what I discover at Chocolatea. If you haven’t visited them, you really should. Even if you only drink coffee and think tea is awful, go there and tell them and ask them to impress you. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!

Chocolatea

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Chocolatea

Chocolatea was originally discovered by Scott a while back and he recently introduced me to this new shop down in Portage. It’s located at 7642 South Westnedge Ave between Schuring Road and Centre Road. They have great hours, open during the early mornings on the weekdays, close at 9p and open at 9a on the weekends. It has become our preferred spot to begin our mornings during the weekends.

I never thought I liked tea, my maternal grandmother loved tea and she would always make tea via teabags and boiling water and it would make this bland brew in her white porcelain teacups. I drank it once and didn’t like it, it tasted like hot tap water with a plant in it. My folks, including the entirety of my paternal side of my family all prefer coffee. They are all very avid coffee drinkers, my mother prefers hers without additives and my father prefers his additives with a little bit of coffee. I will drink coffee if it’s available but I won’t brew it myself and I won’t go out of my way to obtain it. I find black coffee to be too bitter for me. Other people enjoy it so I don’t begrudge them their preferences.

So I drank a lot of soda pop, then tried to get it out of my diet due to the high fructose corn syrup that they use to sweeten it. I switched to diet soda and that was really not much better. I swapped out one unwanted chemical (HFCS) for another (Nutrasweet). So I gave up on soda pop altogether and once I got my HydroFlask, I’ve been enjoying my native element quite a lot (Cancer is a water sign).

It wasn’t until I visited Chocolatea did I re-discover Tea. They have two walls completely devoted to various kinds of looseleaf tea. Almost all of it is high quality full-leaf teas, with only a few powdered teas to speak of. They have apparently a full spectrum of teas from what I’ve been researching. They have White, Green, Black, Oolong, and Pu-erh Teas, some pure, some with additives. They have Earl Grey, with it’s delicious citrusey Bergamot oils in Black and Green varieties, which I really appreciate as that was (and still is) one of my favorite flavors of tea. They also have some Tisanes, Rooibos and Yerba Mate teas to round out the selection. Everything is stored in these glass spring-sealed jars that line the walls. The type of tea has it’s name and an index number and the price per ounce listed plainly on the label. Most of their teas are between 2-4 per ounce and while it seems not very much, tea is exceptionally not-dense, so you get a LOT of tea for the money.

Chocolatea also has a fully stocked supply area to explore tea and I never knew that teabags were a conceit to sell crappy tea to ignorant consumers. It doesn’t help that Americans rejected tea as a drink after the Boston Tea Party (and no, we aren’t going to honor the modern “tea party” whackjobs here) and Americans never recovered a taste for tea. This particular American however has. Chocolatea sells everything you need to make an exceptionally excellent cup of tea. They sell Bodum cups, which are double-walled and insulated so you can pour boiling water into them without scalding your fingertips as you try to drink. They also sell tea infusing baskets, which are cup-sized stainless-steel microfilter baskets that you put the loooseleaf tea into and then pour water on top of. The basket allows water and the soluble parts of the tea to pass in and out while keeping the leaves sequestered in the basket. Making tea this way is so much better than using teabags that I’m amazed there still are teabags!

Chocolatea is 80% about their teas and they sell as well as brew tea to order. They also have a great selection of lattes, coffee, and specialty tea-derived drinks as well that are quite nice. The other 20% of their business is selling supplies, food items and desserts, and their chocolate selection. If you like tea you owe it to yourself to visit Chocolatea, if you like Chocolate, you owe it to yourself to go. Even if you don’t like tea or chocolate (and frankly I don’t know if I want to know you if you don’t like at least chocolate) the atmosphere is incredibly conducive to writing. There is ambient music provided by XM/Sirius celestial radio, but it’s very subdued. The people sounds are the predominant feature in Chocolatea as they do a brisk business. The ever-present mishmash of people talking quietly is very soothing, at least to me. You can’t really make out individual conversations but the droning chatter is pleasant.

Chocolatea has a frequent customer program and if you sign up they ask you for your email, address, and birthday. I can only imagine that they have something clever, marketing wise up their sleeves when they ask for birthdays and email. The owners work their store and I’ve run into them from time to time and they are incredibly helpful and amazingly pleasant people. Their employees are very nice and are always free with kind smalltalk and smiles. One thing I did discover to my chagrin is after buying tea, which they have a little area set aside for dosing out the teas you want into plastic baggies – it’s important to write the name of the tea down as well as it’s index number! I had three baggies with just numbers and not a clue what was in the baggies. After calling Chocolatea they were very happy to help me identify what each baggie contained and now when I buy tea there, I always include the name.

So far, for my explorations I love their black teas, mostly “Paris”, “Earl Grey”, “Cream Earl Grey”, and the Green “Bangkok”. Their Yerba Mate blends are excellent and I just purchased sight-unseen some Pu-erh Tea and that is AMAZING. I keep on marveling at how good tea is now that I’m making it with high-quality ingredients and brewing it the correct way. The owners of Chocolatea are always pushing tea education even when you call them to get names of teas from just having index numbers. They are free with advice on how to brew whites, greens, oolongs, and black teas. Both the temperature of the water, how much tea to use, and how long to let it steep. If you go to Chocolatea, you will get an expertly crafted cup of tea and after you are done, you can hand them back the cup and ask for re-steeps. I had no idea that tea leaves could steep over and over again! The refills are complimentary! One thing to note, if you get an Oolong tea, apparently that particular tea can re-steep a LOT and the flavors in each cup unfold with each steeping. There is so much to explore there, and the prices will not break the bank.

If you have never been, I heartily recommend it! If you love to drink coffee then you really should ask for them to make you a cup of Caramel Pu-erh Tea. I bet you’ll fall head over heels in love with it and want more!

If you would like to get set-up to make tea I can make some good suggestions, first off if you have a tea-pot already then use it. If you don’t, then Rival or GE make a very nice electric kettle for $12 or $30 respectively. I bought a Rival electric kettle for work so I could fill it with water and heat up my water by my desk. The Rival is nice (as I assume the GE one is as well) in so far that when the water boils the unit pops off. When you hear the click, the water is just about at 200 degrees which is perfect for black teas. If you wait just a little bit longer, the water cools so you can make whites or greens too. The infusion basket is $10 and is permanent, so with careful cleaning you’ll never need another one. The Bodum cups are $10 as well. So right there for about $40-$50 of an initial investment you can enjoy tea the way it was meant to be enjoyed! After your initial investment you just have to buy the tea itself and as far as I can tell loose-leaf tea is shelf-stable for a long while, so it’s not like there are any timers that are running if you don’t get around to a particular tea in time.

If you go to Chocolatea and you discover that you like tea as much as I do, please leave comments about what teas you like. I’m always looking to explore more and the selection at Chocolatea is enough to keep you occupied for a very long time.

Winter Visitors

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Since we’ve refilled the bird feeders and filled the sideboards with suet cakes we’ve noticed a huge population of resident birds. I got it in my head to try to identify what we’ve spotted at our feeders. This really won’t be useful to anyone but us, unless one of you readers is interested in bird populations or diversity.

  1. Blue Jay – A male, big bright blue and very aggressive.
  2. Northern Cardinal – A breeding pair, a male and female and they feed together usually. Very skitterish. They do not like the squirrels.
  3. White-Breasted Nuthatch – Not very frequent at the feeder. Will visit the front feeder way more often than the back feeder. Tends to get spooked by picture window and sometimes attacks the reflection in the window. So far no dead nuthatches from window-strikes.
  4. Downy Woodpecker – We have spotted 1 male and 3 females. Originally the male had a seriously hard time keeping on the feeder, he would have to perch and then hold his body under the feeder and crane his neck around to get some seeds. This would throw a lot of seed on the ground. Since we installed the suet cake he monopolizes that instead. The females will only visit the suet cake now as well. That’s apparently their preferred food.
  5. Mourning Doves – We have at least a breeding pair. They never visit the feeder, they prefer to hang out on the ground and wait for the finches and chickadees to toss seed down from the feeder onto the ground. When the downy woodpeckers are after the seed, the mourning doves are “casing the joint”. They’ll follow much later and much prefer the rear feeder to the front one.

Show Me Your Nuts

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Bolt

At work I have an older red hand-truck that has been used hard and left abandoned when it lost too many parts to be useful. My heart went out to the poor thing, unused and hated because it had only one quarter of the bolts needed to keep the deck together and the other side was supported by one of those little metal clasps that you often times see holding a stack of punched paper together.

This past week I resolved to repair this poor hated thing that was left ignored in the supply room here at work. I brought it into my office and removed the only real bolt that was holding the deck together and it was loose. The bolt itself turned out to be a square carriage bolt 5/16-14. Getting the bolt off was a bear because while it was very loose people still tried in-vain to use the hand-truck to lift objects and so the threads of the bolt were all mashed flat and dug up beyond recognition. I was able to grab the nut and bolt with pliers and wrench the two apart freeing the deck from the main body of the frame. Replacing the bolts was easy after I found the right kind and size. I even went so far as to get lock washers and place them on while tightening the nuts onto the bolts with the deck in place.

Everything worked well and I was able to fix the deck, as well as the axle since on the left-side the cotter-pin that held the hub onto the axle fell off and was replaced with yet another one of those circular paper clasps. The only other thing I had to fix for this were replacement casters so people could use the hand-truck as a standard hand-truck or flip the handle around and turn it into a kind of cart. I ordered replacement casters from Amazon.com and they arrived a few days ago. I went back to Lowes and tried to size out the casters because they weren’t 5/16-14.

As I stood there, in front of the mass of fasteners that Lowes carries it struck me how stupid all of it was. I stood back and marveled at the inclusion of both “english” and “metric” system bolts each with their own thread counts which only made things more murky. I was gratified that Lowes carried a 7/16-14 supply of nuts and lock washers. The logical part of me railed silently against all of this. Why the hell are there still “english” measures when not even the English use the “english” system?!? It’s just us, daft stupid Americans who cling to the concept of an inch, which means NOTHING to ANYONE except dullard Americans who refuse to adapt to the better metric system! I also railed against the various thread counts. Why the hell make the same size bolt but cut in different thread counts? IT MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. Why not just standardize on metric bolts and say 5 threads per centimeter and leave it at that! I’m sure there is a mechanical engineer who might come out of the woodwork to tell me why higher thread counts are important. I call bullshit. Why not standardize on one singular measurement system and within that, one standard thread count density?

While standing there in front of all the fasteners I silently exclaimed “This is why we can’t colonize space, we’d die for a lack of 7/16-14 bolts!”

I paid for my parts and assembled the rest of the pieces of the hand-truck together and that’s it. I will likely never need to buy nuts and bolts again for years since very few things in my life actively use nuts and bolts. Computer parts are different. But it doesn’t mean that I find the stupidity any less outrageous!

Old Chicago

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Who knew that the local Old Chicago restaurant in Portage was such a cruisy place? A few days ago Scott and I stopped in for lunch, for a change of pace from our usual trip to Culvers and after being seated and ordering one of the staff members, who might have been a manager, comes up to our table and asks me if I work out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo.

I look confused and then I confirm that I do work out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, as opposed to the older one in Portage. He mentioned that he’s seen me in there several times and that he wanted to welcome me to his establishment.

It was all very above board and very pleasant, however I couldn’t shake the idea that I was being cruised. Thankfully my self-monitor was fully engaged so I didn’t allow the interaction to grow or become anything more than just a pleasant bit of restaurant flattery amongst the flatware.

After the fellow left, I commented on how unusual it was to Scott and he didn’t see the cruisy bit but thought it was a great customer relationship trick, to go out of your way to mention that the proprietor has seen you beyond the confines of their establishment and how it creates a sense of community and recognition. If nothing else, such flattery is very likely to lead to repeat patronage and I have to say that I do enjoy going to that restaurant. Scott then teased me about joining the World Beer Tour game they host there and that I’d flirt with the fellow that flattered me.

There just isn’t any winning. 🙂

Let There Be Light!

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What a busy day! I racked up some serious accomplishment tokens today, just around the house. We’ve had two lights and an electrical socket that have stopped working. The socket sizzled and popped sending chunks of old bakelite and ceramic out into the computer alcove on the second floor of my house. The lights, oh god, the lights. The wall light on the wall of the alcove has been broken for about a year and a half. The hallway light on the ground level has been dead for about two months now.

The socket was just old. I turned off the house power at the mains because I don’t trust that this house I live in was built with any kind of zone-idea when it came to the electrical distribution network here. So instead of risking my life to fix this outlet I just turned the entire house off at the service entrance. I undid the outlet and of course this is the one outlet where they snipped the wires good and short. Any pull out? None whatsoever. On the positive side the house is wired with solid copper wiring, on the negative side, the house is wired with solid copper wiring! That stuff is very stiff and once I got the old outlet out of there (some cussing and swearing) I tried to apply the new outlet and of course the posts for the wires would not stay in an up position, so I had to use a pair of scissors and a screwdriver and a needle-nose plier working with absolutely no give to the wires whatsoever. I did this at sundown of course because I’m a glutton for suffering. Scott held the flashlight and offered moral support while I went on a blue streak against the bright bulbs who built this house. Who the hell trims the wiring to fit exactly in the service box and not give any slack?!? This place does! Gah! I wished very very unpleasant things on the wire-monkey who put the upstairs wiring together. I was finally successful in getting the new outlet installed and I tested it several times and there aren’t any shorts, both plugs in the outlet work fine and that was a solid win on Saturday.

The next deal was our regular going-to-Lowes and fighting over lights. There is something about the lighting department at Lowes. It doesn’t matter which Lowes, they are all the same. When we walk in it’s like we’re both possessed by jilted lovers bent on mutual annihilation. The minute we leave the lighting department everything is fine. It’s a lot like the scene in Transylvania 6-5000 when Doctor Frankenstein goes in and out of his lab, the personality shift is that profound for us both. We needed to replace the light in the hallway on the ground level. Those that have visited us, this light is between the kitchen, bathroom, and two ground floor bedrooms. The bulb was fine, but the fixture was shot. It was my top bet that it was in the fixture because there is no reason for the switch to go bad suddenly and there isn’t any way that wires in walls can have a failure unless they’ve been nibbled on by rodents. We don’t have rodents. So, while we were at Lowes, in the lighting department, wishing we could drown each other with giant sacks of sledgehammers we came across this very neat fixture. It’s a wall-mount fixture with a oiled-copper base (that’s the color name at least) a clear glass bowl and an old style Edison lightbulb featured in the center. These bulbs really are quite awesome. They have multiple filaments and their bodies are clear so you can see the light the glowing filaments make. The bulb is designed to run at 60 watts and only give off 350 lumens of light. It’s dimmer than a standard incandescent bulb and the light is warm and very yellow. To me it’s exceptionally romantic and is a far more appealing choice than standard CFL bulbs which either put out a bluish light or a really white light. The yellow light throws off the color of the hallway, but I really like the look of it and if someone really doesn’t like it, swapping it out for a CFL while they are visiting us is not a problem. Taking down the old fixture was not a problem, the distribution box in the wall was circa 1945 and finding the right screws to fit that was a challenge. The new fixture came with a bracket, and I saw how to assemble it together. I got the old fixture out, cleaned the distribution box as best as I could and installed the bracket, routing the hot and neutral leads through the center hole in the bracket and found the right screws to attach the bracket to the distribution box. An electrician would of course have suffered a full Raiders-Of-The-Lost-Ark facemelt if they were to witness me doing the installation but I can say the damn thing works. Once I got the primary fixture up, the rest of it went very easily. In went the test CFL bulb and that worked fine so I opened up the Edison bulb and it was big and fat and beautiful. I screwed the bulb into the base (it uses a standard bulb base too) and turned it on. The six parallel filaments are glowing and I can see them from here. They throw off a very 19th Century glow.

The upstairs fixture is another matter altogether. Nobody makes fixtures like that anymore. Everyone makes vertical wall fixtures that attach to distribution boxes and in-the-wall wiring. The fixture upstairs eschews all of that for a simple fixture hung with a nail in the wall and an electrical wire running down the wall and plugging into the outlet directly below. This fixture hasn’t worked for years and I’ve been searching in vain for a new one. Several days ago it struck me that something so simple couldn’t be permanently attached and likely could be serviced. So on a previous trip to Lowes I went to the lighting department on my own and found a replacement lamp base with a brass pullchain. I bought the new base and took it home with some replacement incandescent bulbs as this fixtures shade actually attaches right to the bulb itself making CFL’s useless in that application. I grabbed the fixture, and immediately saw how the old base was attached, I pulled it apart, unscrewed the leads and put the new base on, put it all together and tested it and it worked like new! So now when you walk upstairs and turn to the computer alcove you aren’t stumbling around in the dark searching in vain for my desk lamp, the light on the wall is right there and usually will be left on when people are in the house.

Altogether I have to say I’m very pleased with my relatively low-brow DIY accomplishments. New fixtures bring a bit of freshness to this place and repairing the other fixture really pleased me as I no longer have to search in vain for a replacement fixture any longer.

Hooray for tiny accomplishments!

Healthy Chicken Parm

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Today was an exercise in trying to convert a time-honored recipe into a healthy alternative. The dish was Chicken Parm. We all figured that the pasta and sauce was pretty much a fixed requirement so we worked on what could be done with the chicken itself.

Instead of frying the cutlets in breaking and egg, we all pretty much agreed that we should bake the chicken with spices and then when it’s done, give it a little cheese covering. While at the market I found 2% Italian blend shredded cheese which helped cut back on the fat and the calories.

On the whole I thought it came out very well. I would on reflection have cooked the chicken longer or hotter than I did. It was done, but not done where I wanted it. It was good to eat, but just a smidgen rubbery for my tastes.

As a side I rolled up some Pillsbury Croissant Rolls and dressed them in a butter and garlic salt wash before baking. They came out crispy and with just a hint of garlic. The only real leftovers we had were about 3 cups of pasta, but those are easy to put up as leftovers for someone’s lunch tomorrow.

Today we also visited Cody Kresta winery in Mattawan, MI. Every time we go we come away with wine. They have a real passion for wine making and it comes through their bottles. I love their 2010 Chardonnay, it’s got a wonderful note on the palate that I just love. They are only 20 minutes away and so it’s not any real chore to go visit them. The lady who manages the tasting studio there is incredibly pleasant and she sells her wine very well.