Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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RV coffee John's way
Some time back I wrote a page in my Food section on How I Brew My Coffee. Traveling with LD I've been brewing my coffee a little differently.
I still brew coffee in my trusty Thermos Nissan 1.0 L /34 oz. Vacuum Insulated Stainless Steel Gourmet Coffee Press but I've modified the press to drip instead of press.
French press modified to drip
At home I always rinsed the used coffee grounds from the french press into the kitchen sink and flushed them down the drain where they were never heard from again. Now that I have a more intimate relationship with my waste products I've been reluctant to do that. I'm still new at this RVing thing and I'm not sure coffee grounds are a problem but I understand food scraps in the grey tank can be a smelly mess to deal with.
Cleaning coffee grounds out of the bottom of the french press and capturing them so they don't escape down the drain is awkward and messy so I modified my french press into a simple insulated pot - I took the plunger and screen guts out of the lid and stored them. At Wal-Mart I found a knockoff of this Swiss Gold Cone-Shape Coffee Filter meant to replace paper filters. The screen sits nicely atop the press but I don't put my coffee in it directly. I line it with the paper filter it is meant to replace and put my coffee in that. Voila! No mess, no fuss disposal.
All purpose cup
My favorite all purpose drinking cup, the Nissan 11-Ounce Stainless Steel Coffee and Tea Traveler, is still serving me well. I have yet to see anything on the market that would work better. It keeps drinks hot or cold for a couple of hours, has a driver's drinking lip, and best of all has a reliable sealing lid. It goes everywhere with me. Now it is sold, at least at Amazon.com, as the Nissan 12-Ounce Stainless-Steel Tea Tumbler with Infuser, but, really, it's still ok to put coffee in it.
Night camp
Site 8 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Emptiness
Emptiness shouldn't be thought of as a negative. A lot of people misconstrue that as meaning the opposite of something is nothing. But this is something slightly different. I don't want to get into comparative religious things because that's a complicated topic. But if we were to think about it, the problem of life and death has to do with what comes in between, and what comes in between is an awful lot of suffering. We're not just talking about the pain of suffering, we're talking about suffering. Our common everyday parlance it's called stress. That's a kind of suffering and we die from this. From the standpoint of Zen Buddhism this life isn't some sort of stage mock-up for something else that comes after this. This is what we have. We're right here and we're being in this present moment. What you want to think about when you think about emptiness is a way in which to stay present. Just as, in a way, in a very strange kind of concept, there really is no such thing as time. There's no dress rehersal for anything.
The Artful Mind, Reverend Sohaku Flagg, Rinzai Buddhist priest, in an interview with Nanci Race, Jan/Feb 2003