Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

Related, I'm now in a population category that's recommended to get the third dose of vaccine now so I'll be doing that. There are multiple local sites where you can just walk in and get jabbed and we'd be a lot closer to back to normal if more people were taking advantage of that.

For a 2nd year in a row we've decided that our usual New Year's Day fundraiser is too risky, so we'll be doing something else instead.

Over 20 years ago when we were on the other side of the street, Santa's suit lived in a closet in the back room and that's where the neighborhood Santa got himself prepared as his chalet was right next door for most of the time we were there and our bathroom was kept very clean.

My shop usually provides cocoa for a local Santa thing, but given that when you think about the various COVID risk factors, Santa has pretty much all of them, things are getting reworked to be able to do something but not be irresponsible about it. No cocoa, so we agreed to just cover the cost of the Santa so the organizers could move on to figuring out the rest of it.

Attempt #1 was just Brazil and Sumatra. It's a rather nutty Brazilian coffee which was overpowering the flavor profile. I wanted something a little darker and a little sweeter, so the Sulawesi and an adjustment in the Brazil so it's mostly medium roast but a little dark roast got me the darker roast flavor, while switching a little of the Sumatran coffee for just a tiny bit of a light Ethiopian coffee brought up the sweetness. Those changes helped tame the nuttiness.

It took 2 attempts to sort out Holiday Blend coffee this year. The first one I was pretty sure wasn't going to be what I wanted, but would serve as a starting point. From there I identified the deficiencies and adjusted the recipe in a way that would address that and I ended up with exactly what I wanted. It has light, medium, and dark roast coffees from Brazil, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Ethiopia to make something very different from everything else on my shelf. Available soon.

The cat tried to send a toot while I was asleep. It was just the enter key pressed more times than the character limit. I think she just likes to hear the key click when she mashes her face against it.

The last of the pants I ordered online have been delivered. I would have purchased the pants locally but my local options were either hideous or don't fit.

I've been somewhat shocked by how well one of my old #GenshinImpact videos is doing and decided to dig into that and find out why anybody was still finding it. Turns out if you type "Qiqi damage" into Google and click over to the Videos section my video is the top hit with enough description promising a 900K combined damage hit. Here's the copy of it on PeerTube.
https://video.typica.us/videos/watch/06776099-4c81-4348-ab7c-3bfe4c0c2697

Working on new coffees. The Sumatran is quite good and is now available for sale on the web site. https://wilsonscoffee.com/products/sumatra.html

Another couple thousand pounds of coffee just got delivered. Nice day for unloading that.

Espresso machines repairs have been finished. One of them had a switch with a bit of the plastic not all there that they didn't have a replacement in stock yet but there's another identical switch in the machine that nobody ever touches and isn't used for anything so the switches just got swapped so the one that gets used feels better and the one that looks and feels a little off can get replaced later.

Ordered another pack of regional rate B boxes. Hopefully there aren't a ton of chai orders before those show up because as unreasonably high as the shipping cost of that in regional B boxes is, any other shipping option is worse.

Cat.

The cat has decided my arm makes a good pillow.

Spam can be weird sometimes. I cannot imagine anybody reading this and thinking, "this is a legitimate business with a product or service that I am interested in so I will follow up and give them money," and yet this sort of thing persists so presumably it must be working?

Designed the label for the new coffee from Ethiopia. It's a little fancier than the design on most of the coffees. I won't get that up for sale on the web site today, but soon hopefully. Might update a few of the other coffees to use the slightly fancier label design as well.

Picked out what I'm going to try to replicate. Once the coffee was cooled, the darkest roast I tested turned out to be quite delightful, but also very much not what I want to sell this coffee as. In the medium roast range I found a couple cups that had some interesting spiciness going on. But what held up best overall and is a good match for the flavor profile I intended to get out of the coffee was something on the darker side of a light roast where I'm getting fruitiness with good intensity.

Working on figuring out how I want to roast my latest Ethiopian coffee arrival. Dry fragrance is exceptional and in line with the sample I evaluated before buying it. Expected to go for something in the light to medium range and fragrance is suggesting the light side is where I want to go with this, but of course I want to choose after tasting since I'm not trying to sell this as an air freshener.