Who says the sun doesn't shine in PDX?

You know it’s been a gray spring when the sun comes out one day and it makes the front page of the newspaper with the headline “Scary Yellow Globe in Sky Not Going to Stick Around” (as if we expected it to). Yes, it’s been a bit dreary around here. According to the National Weather Service, before last Friday (April 8th), it had been 41 days since our last cloud-free day. The graph below, from The Oregonian, accompanied the story.

Looks like Portlanders are in serious need of some vitamin D

You can see that we haven’t seen the sun much since February 25th, and that any sun we did have was only fleeting. Hopefully, Friday was a sign of good things to come and summer is just around the corner!

A good omen?

Espresso quality control

Here’s a demonstration of the variation in quality between cafés. Compare the two pictures below. In both cases, I ordered a double espresso.

Small and flavorful Too big for an espresso

As you can see, there is a significant difference in the size of the drink (the quarter in the picture gives you a sense of the how big each one was). The difference in quality was even greater.

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Poetry, a picture and some links

It’s April 1st, but where’s the rain?
Does this mean spring has come again?
You see the sun, but dare not blink
It might be gone before you think

 

Today on this, the day of fools
Hopefully you broke some rules
Now set aside your long-week blues
Sit back and read some coffee news

 

The sun is fighting valiantly against the clouds

Good news for coffee drinkers in the Windy City! Stumptown is planning to open another roastery this year, in Chicago. It will be the company’s fourth city with a roastery, after Portland, Seattle and New York. Will Intelligentsia reciprocate in Portland? We'll see. link

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Book Review-A Sense of the World

It has been a while since I last wrote about traveling. That is mainly because I have not done any traveling lately, something that I hope to change soon. After all, traveling is one of the most valuable and invigorating experiences a person can have in life, in my opinion. If you don’t travel, you lose the opportunity to enjoy and appreciate the wider world.

In an effort to take to the road without actually taking to the road, I recently read A Sense of the World-How a Blind Man became History’s Greatest Traveler, written by Jason Roberts. The book is a biography of James Holman, a fearless traveling Englishman, who, in spite of his blindness, was able to travel all over the world. What makes the story even more compelling is that he did his traveling in the first half of the 19th century.

Holman was not blind from birth. He was born in 1787, one of six brothers and the son of a pharmacist. In those days, class structures were very rigid in England, and Holman’s father had high ambitions for his son, whom he wanted to become a gentleman. One way for a commoner to do this was to reach officer status in the military, which is what James Holman did.

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Extracto Il Secondo

After spending time with the supermodel at Jim and Patty’s, I headed westward down Fremont Street, en route to the Albina branch of the Multnomah County Library. As I was walking, a  whiff of freshly-brewed coffee tickled my nose. It smelled wonderful, so I followed my nose toward the scent and stumbled upon another quality Portland café, Extracto 2*.

The sign is easy to find

[*Confession: That’s not exactly how things happened. What really happened was that I was kind of lost, so I checked my location on my phone, realizing that I was close to Prescott Street. Prescott Street stuck out in my mind as the location of the café (these days I tend to remember Portland streets by the cafés that are on them). I was only a few blocks away, so instead of going to the library, I headed for the café.]

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