200710

Howdy partners! Ha!... Kind of a big day today. For whatever reason... morbid sense of curiosity... love of coffee... a paycheck... Ol' Curly has managed to reach the fifteen year mark. Today is the day. But before we get into that... let me handle the essentials. We head into Genova today. If yer in Italy ya gotta stop in Genova... Huge port town but some of the best pesto you ever done had. Seriously... I have never been able to duplicate it. It's not something you can just add more cheese to to get it to taste better.... and it pisses Ol' Curly off somethin' fierce. Anyway... it's also the major hub of getting to Nice and the French Riviera... if you take the train. Most of the Northern Italian mail sits at this port of a helluva long time before they finally seal up the crate and ship it off. Yeah... the Italians have shitty postal service... the worst ever. One time... I shipped some Aperol back from Venice on day 2 of my trip... it arrived (and one bottle took a blow to the cap) 2 months after I got home. The Deruta bowl I shipped on day 30 of my trip.... waiting on my doorstep.

It'll be tough to keep the groupetto together today... there's a helluva lot of bumps in the profile and a nice little riser to the finish.

15 years ago (yesterday) Ol' Curly was just Curly back then... he got a call at his hell on earth job at Boss Tweed in Bellingham, WA. They wanted Curly to interview for store #351... it was actually the 148th store built, but for some damned reason any store outside of downtown Seattle got a different number outside of the 100 level denomination. So... I told the caller that if he didn't mind that I had just cut up 40lbs of halibut into American-sized postions that I would come over immediately for an interview. He said "Shit, I was a Navy cook... I'll be fine"... Needless to say, some things are meant to be. It was different times back then folks... Almond Vanilla Hazlenut... Non-fat milk was an oddity... Whole milk was king... Breve was for the secret society that knew about it... Beans were scooped and bagged... coffee was lovingly ground, tamped and pressed into 2 shots of pure coffee goodness. There weren't any blenders... no teas other than the looseleaf ones that looked like spiders in a jar... Janette, Maggie, Paige, Stephanie, Julie, Leigh, Rachel, Carrie Lee, and Tony... Yeah... I remember all of their faces and what they taught me. Care about coffee, care about customers, care about what yer doin'. All of those folks are gone... I'm now part of the 2% of the relics that stay out of a morbid sense of curiosity. There will be 2 others that celebrate 15 years this month. One celebrated last week, one will celebrate next week. Do I miss my time in the front lines... a little... simpler times... times of clarity of purpose.

My first day on the job coulda killed me... the second opener called in sick... the asst. came in on his day off to get a till for me... They let me run a Sunday morning by myself. The customers felt so bad they pity-tipped. Like you tip the special needs fella who busses at a restaurant. Day one tips: $118... all acquired in the 3 hours I was by myself. What's next?? I'll tell you soon enough...

Yer Trainin': Go have a cup of coffee... ask what kind it is... think about what it took to get there... think about where you were on May 22, 1992... some of you watched Carson for the last time... ya see, that was also the day of his last Tonite Show. Happy World Biodiversity Day!