Things that make you go brmmmm

So we have now been in the US of A for two years, and to celebrate by coincidence we bought a new car that day. It isn't new new, just new to us. It's 4WD for those lumpy roads, and craptastic enough that we won't care much about mud, sand, scratches, sun damage, and all the other ways that the Nevada desert likes to reclaim vehicles unto itself and generally return them to the dust whence they sprang.

There were several strikingly interesting things about the transaction. And yes, I will now proceed to list them. You may want to give it up as a bad job without reading further.

And I would take Five Thousand Photos

#1, table lamp,
Amargosa
opera house

We bought a new camera in April 2016 - yeah it's an epoch in your relationship when you share a camera body.

It's a Sony α5000, so pretty much the bottom end of reasonably recent mirrorless digital cameras. We have been enjoying it a lot and acquired a few more lenses for it last month.

Here's a little retrospective of a few of our first 5000 shots.

I was going to start with pic #1 but - oh vanity! - it's a truly terrible photo of me so I'm just showing one corner of it.

The best of all earthly drinks (Waiter, waiter, percolator)

Thanks, Enterprise Mfg Co

So, I like to focus my effort for maximum impact (this is my new way of saying 'lazy') and therefore although we have not one, but two, hand grinders, we usually just buy ground coffee. Since it's not espresso we're making, the ultimate freshness of just-ground beans doesn't seem to matter quite so much. Also, laz- I mean focus.

But I have at last seen the ultimate coffee mill, at the Beatty Museum. Machines of this type date to the 1870s - this one may be later, as Beatty didn't really take off til the early 1900s. It would probably have been used in a mercantile store, of course.

Probably will not work for camping. Guess we'll keep buying ground beans for now.

Our camp coffee pot has been mentioned in dispatches already. Made by the legendary (in Sweden, anyway) Berggren, maker of beautiful things, it's a vintage enamelled percolator with cheery coffee-based song lyrics - in Swedish - in gothic script around the sides. 

The verse is the first two lines of a coffee song ("Kaffevisan" - you have to love a language that has a
word just for songs about coffee.) 

"Kaffetåren den bästa är
av alla jordiska drycker"

Or "coffee is the best of all earthly drinks".

I bought it together with a kettle ("En vaktad kittel blir aldrig bränd" - a watched kettle will never burn - huh, it's about caution not about impatience :) and we use them for camping and other travelling, for a comforting brew-up or the essential morning fuel or heating dishwater or whatever.


Yeah coffee songs. I know "Java Jive", the Manhattan Transfer version. And? Think I could do with more, would give me something to sing under my breath while I watch the percolator perc away over the camp stove at 5 a.m. of a Sunday morning. They're out there, I just need to learn them.

I thought the Kaffevisan on my coffee pot might be beyond me - the first version I found struck me as kinda weird. But this one looks more doable although it may require all the cheerfulness of a Nevada morning sky as well as quite a lot of ... well ... coffee. 

Must go and make another pot now.

My wonderful stove

My wonderful stove was beautifully upcycled from an aluminium can. It runs on isopropyl alcohol and can boil a litre of water in less than ten minutes - when there's snow on the ground. It packs into a tiny plastic box. (Even with its separate windshield, it takes up less room than a barbecue lighter.) It's shiny, though not as shiny as it used to be.  

The little stones in the measuring cup are for levelling it on rough ground. The medicine measuring cup came with, but I only use it for keeping the stones away from the walls of the stove, since there are measuring markings on the inside of the stove anyway.

To use it, you pour in the alcohol (I buy Heet antifreeze in the yellow bottle), set it alight, wait until the side jets start burning, and set the pot directly on the top. This chokes the flame from the main large round cavity, and paradoxically provides better fuel efficiency. It does best with a pot that's at least 5 inches across - our coffee pot is borderline too small. 

An early outing was at Cedar Pockets (great name!) at Christmas time, as we stopped for a brew-up. Yes, that's correct, as kettles go, it is the coolest in the world, closeup below*.

And later the same day, made soup for lunch at Pipe Spring (another great name). I managed without gloves but there were flurries of snow while we were there. (In case you're wondering, it's a turkey and avocado soup.)

I bought the stove from Mechanic Mike on ebay and I heartily recommend both the stove itself and the seller. Here's his video.

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*So is the matching coffee pot. These guys will probably get their own post some time.