Category: Personal

Ruta Maya just opened on Thursday in my neighborhood. That’s a Central-American themed coffee importer, coffee house, music venue and all around hangout.
For those of you in Austin, it’s on South Congress in a strange, artsy-hip new professional office park, behind, of all places, the Expose strip club.
Now I need to get a wireless card, and I’ll have a coffee-shop office, which I’ve been missing in Austin ever since my favorite coffee place at 7th and Neches shut down. High Life was run by a husband and wife team. She was the head barista and she put artistry into coffee drinks. I can still taste their coffee. He ran the kitchen. Interesting stuff by local artists always on the walls. They left a couple of years ago to follow their dream to open a bed and breakfast in New Mexico. My IQ has gone down 20 points and personal productivity has plummeted since they closed; I used to go there weekend mornings to reflect and write and plan the week.
Even when I have a permanent office workplace, I go to coffee shops to sit, think, and write. There’s something about caffeine and background music that helps focus and concentration.
When I worked in a mostly-virtual team from the Boston area, my favorite office was TeaTray in the Sky, in Porter Square, Cambridge. The name comes from a quote in Alice in Wonderland; they had surreal Alice murals painted on the walls, teas from around the world, really good coffee, expensive but yummy food and desserts, and a secret wall phone jack (this was pre-WiFi). One of the owners had been a pastry chef at Biba’s which was one of Boston’s best restaurants.
In my neighborhood in Austin, Jo’s and Bouldin have the bohemian atmosphere but to be honest, average coffee and average food. Jo’s was built 3 years ago in classic Austin neo-roadside-shack style; the seating area is open-air, with plastic sheeting for rain and chill. The chairs are too short for the tables (for a 5’6″ person) and the tables and chairs rattle. No power supply. It’s nice when the weather is wonderful. Bouldin is genuine, South-Austin hippie, with games and ratty paperback books on the shelves, and a veggie-brunch menu. I wish they had better coffee. South Lamar Starbucks has drinkable coffee and usable chairs. But it’s Starbucks.
The Mad Bird opened up this year on South Congress, as an extension to a garden/landscape story. It is genuinely and delightfully odd; the back deck looks onto the plants display. Last spring, I watched a hummingbird hover around the flowers while working on a presentation over coffee and a sandwich.
A bit further away on Barton Springs, Flipnotics has good coffee and an Austin casual-hipster vibe. Mozart’s has a gorgeous view of the river, good coffee (they roast), mediocre, overpriced pastries, and a frat-child clientele. Mozart’s is my favorite date-screening location, and has been the site of plenty of unspeakably bad dates. Ask me in person if you really and truly want to know.
I’m just thrilled that Ruta Maya’s in the neighborhood. Next posts will be made with music in the background, good coffee and strange art on the walls.

see y’all next week.

Tim Bratcher

LENTILS WITH BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND WALNUTS, from Epicurious
I tripled the recipe to serve a larger group. The cookbook says the recipe can be prepared in 45 minutes or less; if you need to make more, leave more time for all of the chopping. Also, I microwaved the squash til it was easy to peel and slice, and then combined the first two cooking steps.
1 small butternut squash (about 1 pound)
1 large shallot
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 cup walnuts (substituted tamari almonds)
1/3 cup lentils
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro sprigs
fresh lime juice to taste
Preheat oven to 425
After that we vacuum sealed the food, its amazing how long food can stay fresh when you vacuum seal your food. If you are not vacuum sealing your own food then I highly recommend. Check out Vacuum sealer research, they review best vacuum sealers and give amazing tips on how to vacuum seal your food!

Fellow lizard fan

Check out the list of titles in this British Airways registration form. It is too funny.
They serve people from many regions and cultures with different languages (Herr, Fraulein, Monsieur, Sheikh). There are special needs, such as serving Muslims on pilgrimage (Alhaji).
England is a class-conscious society, so they probably had customers wanting to register with their social and military titles. I can just see the secretary for some elderly Baron or Viscountess dressing down some poor BA functionary for not listing the correct title. I can see some web programmer throwing their hands up in despair, getting a book of titles, and including every last one.
Besides, the Pope and the Dalai Lama do fly fairly frequently with retinues. The field for “His Holiness” has probably been used.

Please accept the most luxurious edition of Moby Dick ever published, for just $5.95! (Regularly $39.95)
Leather-bound and accented with pure 22-carat gold.
Imagine this Luxurious Volume on Your Library Shelves,
ADINA LEVIN
—-
At a holiday party at the home of an executive, I once saw an astonishing library. Two full stories of shelves lined with books, with a rotating ladder to reach the upper shelves. The books were bound in leather, carefully arranged by color and height.

This past summer I purchased a lawn mower for the first time in my life.
Like other acts of homage to the spirits of hardware, the search for a lawn mower was a learning experience.
At first I considered a manual mower. I don’t have that much grass, I don’t have big hills — it seemed like the simplest solution.
I hadn’t realized that manual lawnmowers had evolved from utilitarian garden implements to totems of yuppie nostalgia and sentimental patriotism.
Lawn mower of the past
Then I read that manual lawnmowers tend get stuck on twigs; and they can’t cut grass if it gets more than 5 inches high. So I looked further….
And found that advanced technology now can automate the lawnmowing process completely. You buy a little, round, red or yellow Pacman-like robot You install a wire around the edge of the lawn. The robot lawnmower then buzzes around the grass, munching away within the wire perimeter. They haven’t worked out the bugs yet — the algorithm doesn’t cut evenly and hit has some trouble with bumps and sticks. And it costs a bit more than I wanted to spend. So I searched on.
Lawn mower of the future
And I discovered that cutting the grass was no simple yard chore. Mowing the lawn is an opportunity to transcend the life of this world, and commune with the world of the spirit.
Lawn mower of the world to come
While I steeped myself in lawnmower lore and learning, I borrowed a gasoline mower from some friends to mow the lawn before the yard turned into a jungle. It was loud. It was smelly. And it was too heavy for me to lift.
I finally settled on the prosaic, best-selling Black-and-Decker electric mower from Amazon.com. It’s quiet. It won’t explode. I can easily move it up and down stairs.
Lawn mower of the present

Just had a really nice time with this Ali McGraw yoga video, with Erich Schiffman as the teacher. I use props for some of the standing poses, and am a lot less flexible than the beautiful people getting sand in their toes and their tights in the White Sands Desert. I was able to concentrate, rather than to wish each pose would finish as soon as possible. Four years ago this tape seemed completely impossible. I’ve also been enjoying Rodney Yee’s power yoga for strength, which is labeled for beginners but isn’t, as the Amazon comments tend to say. As strength training, much prefer this to lifting weights. Lifting weights is dull, and yoga is not dull because of the concentration.
I can’t help but think sarcastic thoughts when the teachers get schmaltzy. When the Yoga teacher to the Hollywood stars says, “surrender completely, love is what you have when there is nothing left” — I mentally translate “give me all of your money, and savor the feeling of inner peace.” If anybody knows that Erich Schiffman is really not, on some level, a phony, please let me know and I’ll stop making fun of him.
Combine Eastern spirituality with Eastern European Jewish guilt and Misnagnish disdain for spiritual exhibitionism, and I feel kind of awkward and guilty writing about yoga practice. The Austin weather forecast calls for thunderstorms; if the house is hit by lightning I’ll know what happened.

Here’s an interesting explanation for why most girls don’t like computer games, backed up by experience and research. And it’s not just that “boys like shooting; girls like shopping.”
Girls tend to find repetitive shoot-em-ups boring. Girls like solving puzzles more than competing, and enjoy reaching goals rather than scoring points.
This explanation sounds plausible and certainly resonates for me.