It has been a while since I bought new eyeglasses, but I finally got some new ones today. It is so odd how much your “look” changes (as well as your outlook) when you wear glasses. It is probably the only fashion accessory I use on any occasion and one that is, in my case, required.
I have worn glasses since I was 10 years old, so this is probably my 15 pair, but the new look never fails to throw me when I look in the mirror. After a week or so, I am sure I won’t even notice, but right now it feels odd.
We have had a combination coffee pot and steam espresso maker for quite a while now. In fact, it has been brought back into everyday use 3 times now, when other pots failed to last very long. Today, though, I came across a coffee maker that better meets our current needs and even takes up a bit less space on the countertop.
I came across the Cusinart CHW-12 Coffee Plus while out on a stroll Saturday evening. We were just walking to walk and chose a busy retail area so we could do a little window-shopping and people watching along the way. I headed into a home store and just decided to take a look at the coffee makers on offer. I had decided I wanted to get a new unit a while ago, but hadn’t really been looking much and was in no great hurry, as our current pot was still working ok.
There are so many coffee makers on the market today with all sorts of features, including the very popular 1-cup “pod” machines. I prefer to choose my own coffee wherever I wish (and also to avoid the relatively large waste generated by a 1-cup machine) so I was looking for something more traditional.
As it happens, my wife switched from coffee to tea drinking a little more than a year ago. She has been using a stovetop kettle to heat her water and I had been looking to buy an electric kettle for here, just to speed things up a bit and make her mornings a little easier. Oddly enough, this coffee maker also comes with a hot water on demand feature which I think will be perfect for her tea making both in the morning and in the evenings. We both tend to like a cup of decaf after dinner. The hot water area holds enough water for about 8 cups of tea, with 2 cups being immediately available when the Hot Water feature is turned on. I am guessing we will warm it up in the morning, turn it off after the morning routine finishes and then fire it back up in the evening, We don’t have a need to keep the hot water active all the time, although for a family get-together or party it would be nice to have available.
The coffee side of the appliance is fairly typical, although this will be the first unit I have ever owned with a timer start feature, which could come in handy without ever-changing schedules.
It will be interesting to see how this unit works out, but as an avid coffee drinker I wanted to share this small bit of our everyday life in hopes it might give you an idea of where to start if you are looking for a new coffeemaker.
TV Worth Watching is a new series highlighting my favorite television viewing. I am a big fan of UK television, so you are sure to see many UK shows and movies featured here. — Douglas
TV Worth Watching: Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England
What would you need to know if you were time traveling back to Elizabethan England? What would you need to learn to move among the poor, the rich and the up-and-comers in 16 Century Society. Learn it all in this excellent documentary series with Ian Mortimer, writer of the books of the same name.
I love series like this. They are given the time to fully explore a period of history or a section of science or the arts without ignoring huge swathes of history or important information. I am alway keeping watch for new, similar documentaries from the BBC. They rarely fail to entertain as well as inform.
“Ian Mortimer transports viewers back to Elizabethan England and reveals, in vivid detail, a living, breathing Tudor world. Viewers learn how ordinary Tudor housewives turned plants into medicine, how the middle classes kept themselves clean using linen cloths, how the poor made pottage, how cooks of the rich devised recipes for new ingredients, and how Tudors learned to read and write.” – BBC
From Amazon.com…
“From the author of one of the biggest-selling history books of recent years, the follow-up to The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. The past is a foreign country — this is your guide.
We think of Queen Elizabeth I as ‘Gloriana’: the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (1558-1603) as a golden age of maritime heroes, like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, and of great writers, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time?
In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a prospective traveller to late sixteenth-century England would ask. Applying the groundbreaking approach he pioneered in his bestselling Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, the Elizabethan world unfolds around the reader.” – Amazon.com
More information on Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England :
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Starting our Summer Break from school, we met up with another family at the Museum of the American West, part of the Autry Center in Griffith Park. The Museum is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year and unfortunately, large sections of the museum are closed for renovation. That said, there is still quite a bit to see. I created this montage video and also took a number of photos during our trip.
Here is a 4:15 min video I created are 66 from our visit to the show on Saturday, June 8, 2013. The show continues on Sunday, June 9, 2013. Full information is available at the link above.
TV Worth Watching is a new series highlighting my favorite television viewing. I am a big fan of UK television, so you are sure to see many UK shows and movies featured here. — Douglas
TV Worth Watching: Mechanical Marvels Clockwork Dreams
Another amazing documentary from the BBC which explains how innovations in clockwork led to more and more lifelike automata designed for the entertainment of the rich in the early 18th Century. I am always amazed at the quality of these BBC Documentaries and how much I learn with each one. I have had the pleasure, in the past, to see some amazing automata at a performance at the Magic Castle and I have always been fascinated with them and amazed at how complex these devices could be, especially considering that most of them were made long before what we think of as “technology” even existed.
“Documentary presented by Professor Simon Schaffer which charts the amazing and untold story of automata – extraordinary clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic and recreate life.
The film brings the past to life in vivid detail as we see how and why these masterpieces were built. Travelling around Europe, Simon uncovers the history of these machines and shows us some of the most spectacular examples, from an entire working automaton city to a small boy who can be programmed to write and even a device that can play chess. All the machines Simon visits show a level of technical sophistication and ambition that still amazes today.” — BBC
More information on Mechanical Marvels Clockwork Dreams:
The Angeles National Forest is FREE to all tomorrow, June 8, 2013 with no Adventure Pass purchase required as part of National Get Outdoors Day.
Normally an Adventure Pass is required to parking at numerous sites throughout the Forest, but these fees are waived several times per year in all the National Forests.
Here is 6+ minutes of silent footage of the Channel Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis santacruzae) taken June 1, 2013 on Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands National Park. This trip was organized by the Friends of the Island Fox, a non-profit group dedicated to preserving the Island Fox and helping it recover from near extinction.
The footage show island foxes exhibiting natural behaviors at the Prisoner’s Harbor landing area on Santa Cruz Island.
On June 1, 2013, we joined the Friends of the Island Fox for a trip to Santa Cruz Island, part of Channel Islands National Park. After a 1.5 hour boat ride to Prisoner’s Harbor, we hiked about, inspected the newly restored wetlands, saw the Channel Island Scrub Jay, island specific flora and, of course, the Channel Island Fox, an endangered species that only lives on the Channel Islands of California.
About Island Fox from the Friends of the Island Fox web site…
“The island fox (Urocyon littoralis) is very small in size, comparable to a small domestic house cat. It is 15-18% smaller than its ancestor, and closest relative, the gray fox (Urocyon cineroargenteus). Island fox size: Adults typically 12-13 inches high at the shoulder, 23-27 inches long from nose to tail tip, weigh 3-6 lbs
Males are slightly larger than females. Coloration is similar to the gray fox: grizzled gray along the top of the head and back, but with a greater amount of rufous or cinnamon coloring along the belly, neck and legs, and white along the cheeks and throat to the chest. The tail also has a darker black stripe along the top.”
From Wikipedia.org…
“The island fox shares the Urocyon genus with the mainland gray fox, the species from which it is descended. Its small size is a result of insular dwarfism, a form of allopatric speciation. Because the island fox is geographically isolated, it has no immunity to parasites and diseases brought in from the mainland and is especially vulnerable to those the domestic dog may carry. In addition, predation by the golden eagle and human activities devastated fox numbers on several of the Channel Islands in the 1990s. Four island fox subspecies were federally protected as an endangered species in 2004, and efforts to rebuild fox populations and restore the ecosystems of the Channel Islands are being undertaken. Radio collars are being attached to foxes in an effort to track and locate the young foxes. To date these efforts have been largely successful.
There are six subspecies of the island fox,[1] each of which is native to a specific Channel Island, and which evolved there independently of the others. The subspecies are:[1]
Urocyon littoralis littoralis of San Miguel Island,
Urocyon littoralis santarosae of Santa Rosa Island,
Urocyon littoralis santacruzae of Santa Cruz Island,
Urocyon littoralis dickeyi of San Nicolas Island,
Urocyon littoralis catalinae of Santa Catalina and,
Urocyon littoralis clementae of San Clemente Island.
Foxes from each island are capable of interbreeding, but have genetic and phenotypic distinctions that make them unique; for example, the subspecies have differing numbers of tail vertebrae.
The small size of the island fox is an adaptation to the limited resources available in the island environment. The foxes are believed to have “rafted” to the northern islands between 10,400 and 16,000 years ago.[3] Initially, fox populations were located on the three northern islands, which were likely easier to access during the last ice age—when lowered sea levels united four of the northernmost islands into a single mega-island (Santa Rosae) and the distance between the islands and the mainland was reduced—it is likely that Native Americans brought the foxes to the southern islands of the archipelago, perhaps as pets or hunting dogs.[4]“
Based on a true story, The Promise follows Mary, the 9 year old daughter of slave family in Louisiana in the 1850s. Because Mary and her father can read and write, Mary’s family is promised freedom if they travel with their master on the treacherous Oregon Trail. When they reach Oregon, the master frees the parents but keeps Mary and her brother as slaves. Mary’s parents take the master to court to sue for custody of their children, and with Mary’s brave testimony, they set in motion a law which helps determine if Oregon will come into the Union as a free state or a slave state. The Promise is a historical chapter book for children ages 7-9.
About the authors
Dawn Comer Jefferson
Dawn Comer Jefferson is a television writer whose credits include Judging Amy, South of Nowhere, The Bold & the Beautiful and the Los Angeles Holiday Celebration. Dawn was nominated for an Emmy Award for Our Friend, Martin, an animated family film about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. With Rosanne Welch, Dawn co-edited the nonfiction book, Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work, and Family (Seal Press).
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
* You don’t need a Kindle device to read Kindle books. With Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader — a web browser-based Kindle Reader — you don’t even need to download any extra software. That said, the Kindle reader apps for Windows, Macintosh, iPhone, iPad and Android devices improves the reading experience.
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