Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Popped open the laptop case to double check that I had an empty slot to pop in another drive since I'm running out of space and don't really want to offload stuff to external storage right now. Scooped a bunch of dust out while I was in there.

Car started today. It hasn't for the past few days due to excess coldness.

Snacks, cat, and another blanket.

I expect to have the Internet again on Monday morning. Until then I'll be on phone tethering which isn't that awful these days, but I'll be glad to have a wire again.

2nd attempt at contacting the Internet company went a lot better. I was passed through to a human relatively promptly who was happy to believe that restarting the modem isn't going to help when a tree fell through the line and visibly severed it and they really will need to send someone out to put in a new cable to the house.

House is just about back up to a normal temperature downstairs at least. A blanket and a lap cat is more than good enough. Upstairs is still a bit cold. Tomorrow I'll have to call to get Internet hooked back up.

I've been informed that I have power and heat at home again, so if the roads aren't too bad I'll probably move my cat back home tonight.

Power company is estimating that they'll be reconnecting power by 5PM, so I'll be able to check that out after work. I'll need to be there anyway to deal with shoveling, but I think I should probably plan on staying one more night at Mom's. There's also still the matter of making sure the heat comes back on and getting that fixed if it doesn't, and once I've confirmed electrical service I'll want to get Internet hooked back up since that cable snapped in half when the tree fell through it.

The cat is bashing her face against the side of the laptop. She usually has her own keyboard to face smash, but I left that at home.

Just under half of the first batch of the new coffee went into pre-order (a few regular customers got a preview because I don't need the whole pot that I brew for myself to approve the coffee going out for sale and finalizing the description) so there's a tiny bit on the shelf and I'll have to roast more tomorrow.

New coffee is up on the web site now.

Trying the production test batch of the new coffee from Bali. I decided to stop this one right at the start of 2nd crack, but to push the roast to that point a little faster than on the initial product development evaluation. This helped bring the overall intensity up a bit while still being super smooth with nice floral and fruit notes. It's a somewhat weird and wonderful coffee. Some customers have also had a chance to try it and I've got some pre-orders for tomorrow based on that.

My mother is happy to see that the cat is consenting to being pet faster on this visit, but kind of jealous that the cat still prefers to sit on me when I'm there. Meanwhile, my house is still without electricity. The guy working on that tried hooking a generator up to the furnace to get that up and running at least, but couldn't get it to fire up.

It's going to be a while before I have power at my house so I've removed the frozen food from my freezer and will be taking that to my Mom's house as well. I'd already taken care of the stuff in the fridge section. Probably should have done that earlier in the day.

If it weren't for the fact that I brought this in as a limited edition coffee and just don't have enough to sell any of it as green, I'd recommend it to my home roasting customers as something where you can take your best guess for the roast level you generally like and you'll probably end up with something delightful.

Narrowing things down a bit, cup 1 seems quite nice as a light roast. Cups 5-7 are a bit more approachable in more of a medium roast, and I don't think I'd want to go darker than cups 12-13 if I decided to do a dark roast.

It's rather nice across the entire range (even the lightest and darkest cups) with nothing coming out as particularly objectionable. I probably want to push the overall roast timing a bit faster to boost the intensity a bit, but the pick here will really be about deciding where the balance is nicest.

After some delays, I'm finally tasting the new coffee from Bali. The lot I'm working with is a bit of an oddball, so I pulled 15 cups ranging from what I consider my generally lightest palatable roast through to not quite the darkest thing I have on the shelf.

This'll be, I think, the fourth replacement network cable running to my house in the past year. Kind of sick of the neighbor's trees attacking me and wish I knew what I'd done that was so offensive to them.

Probably won't have power properly restored tonight, but I've got a guy working on the repairs that need to happen on my side of things before the power company will come back and hook that up, but he's going to plug the furnace into a generator and get the house heated up tonight. I've already taken the cat and a suitcase to Mom's house and I can crash there until I have power back on properly. Then I'll have to get the Internet cable put back in.