torley manor

DAY EIGHT
Friday I didn’t have to go to work. Not because of the snow, but rather due to a lack of warm spaces at my work. Dirty Pete (my boss) needed a warm space to spraypaint some stuff and the office/showroom area was the only area warm enough to make this happen. Sooo, he told me not to bother to come in (lest I inhale too many paint fumes and become useless to the company).

So I slept in and then got up and shoveled the walk, ate some breakfast, and decided to brave driving to go to a cafe for my Fun-A-Day project. I opted to check out Enrico’s Tazzo D’Oro in Highland Park. Over the years I’ve only ever gone there about 4 or 5 times. Its a nice cafe, but for whatever reason, we just never go there. Its a bit strange because as avid tea drinkers, you would think that a cafe with an extensive loose tea selection to choose from would warrant more visits.

Braving the icy roads

So yes, they usually have a considerable range of teas to choose from — black, green, white, oolong, herbal, etc. Their tea list is fairly long — about 6 pages and totalling maybe around 25-30 teas. Unfortunately when I was there on friday, a good third of the teas seemed to be out of stock. This included the “Eight in the Fort” tea that Mr. Chris Tracey recommended. As such, I settled on a Ti Kuan Yin oolong — also sometimes known as the “Iron Goddess of Mercy.” Its a little bit more on the green tea side of the spectrum, thus being a bit more subtle, not quite as bold of a flavor as I tend to prefer in an oolong, but still delicious. I took up residence in the window seat right by the door. Aside from the occasional gust of cold air when someone entered/exited, it was a wonderful seat to watch the people walk by and the snow fall. I tinkered with some of the zine writing that I had already completed, but didn’t have a particularly productive writing session. Noting the continually deteriorating road conditions, I opted for a quick second re-brew of my cup and then hit the road.

I made a quick stop at the Home Depot to grab a handful of 2×4′s and some casters to build a new workbench base. I came home and spent the better part of my afternoon working on this project. This will hopefully allow me to have two separate work areas for my silkscreening and my woodworking. Woodworking will remain in the basement where I can continue to make a big dusty mess. Silkscreening will move up to the middle room on our second floor, which for the past almost six years has been relegated to the task of “junk room”.

Here’s the new workbench base. It still needs a work surface. I put casters on it so it can be rolled out of the way when not in use, but can be rolled back into the middle of the room for screening. It has locking casters so it won’t roll all over the place as I attempt to use it.

DAY NINE
I skipped out on going to a cafe again, but I had good reason. I ran out to Construction Junction in the morning and found a good solid-core door to make into a work surface for my new workbench. Solid-core doors work great for work benches because they are solid, thick, and cheap. I found a decent one for $20. I cut the door down to 5 feet long and had to do a little reconstructive work to fill in the doorknob hole (the one major drawback to using a door for a workbench is that they’ll usually have this hole). After a little woodputty-ing and sanding, the surface was ready to be painted, but I realized I had a kinda shitty selection of paints. I thought that it might be best to put a coat of primer down, so did that and then thought it might be fun to make the underside of the work surface a bright color, thus opting to use some leftover lime green paint from our hallway project. I got one coat of green on there and called it a day on that project.

I then mixed up a batch of dough to make some calzones for dinner. I’ve been enjoying making lots of dough this winter so far and we’ve been trying out hands at a variety of calzones. On saturday it was spinach, broccoli, mushrooms, soy cheese, and pizza sauce. They weren’t my greatest work but they were damn tasty. We started to watch Season Two, Disc One of Flight of the Conchords, but Emma, having had a long hard day at work, fell asleep after two episodes. I filled out the night by watching the Eagles get their asses handed to them by the Cowboys and then caught the beginning of SNL.

DAY TEN
On saturday I had called REI about renting snowshoes and they assured me they had plenty of pairs and that we didn’t need to reserve them. Thus you can imagine our consternation upon finding them all rented out when Chris, Emma and I arrived there on sunday morning. After some deliberation and checking in with the new REI store out at Settler’s Ridge (whom also had none available), we decided to just go non-snowshoe hiking out at Raccoon Creek State Park, which was quite pleasant, despite the cold. We did the Mineral Springs Loop Trail, which had iced over nicely to form some amazing icicles and an ice cave. Check out all of our photo’s from the journey here.

Chris and I hanging out by some dangerous icicles!!

After hiking around for awhile, we met up with Martha and Ellery at Mad Mex Robinson to celebrate Ellery’s six-month “birthday.” Ellery celebrated by chewing on the table and knocking over a glass of water. I tried the Tofu Tacos (which were delicious). My chickpea chili was unfortunately a bit watery, though not bad, just below average. Much food was consumed. Good times were had.

CHOMP!!

DAY ELEVEN
Yes, yes — i know this post is getting long. I will just talk about our cafe trip.

After work I came home and picked up Emma and we headed to Voluto, on Penn Avenue just down the street from the Quiet Storm. I had heard that they had a good tea selection and had recently read their blog about some of their new tea offerings. Mike Ovens had once referred to the interior of the cafe as “looking like an iPod”. Well, these are accurate representations. They have a small tea selection, maybe about eight varieties (you’d think i’d actually start counting these things by now), but they rotate it and they aren’t just your normal run-of-the-mill varieties. They had a white tea, a couple black teas, a couple green teas, a couple oolongs, and i think just one herbal. They didn’t have any real descriptions listed but the barista working today took a couple minutes to explain the differences in flavor. I settled on a Organic Luan Melon green tea.

As you can see, they give you a pretty nice tea service — it all comes on a wooden tray with the tea pre-brewed (presumably timed and removed at the appropriate time) in one of those wonderful Bee House teapots. I took my first cup with a small dash of sugar (there didn’t seem to be any honey around, but i didn’t bother asking) which I think really smoothed out a bit of the grassier notes of the tea. The rest of the pot I drank without sweetener and found it pleasant, a nice bit of natural sweetness to it, with as I said just a touch of grassiness. Emma and I spent our time doing some planning for our upcoming Pacific Northwest trip in February. No writing was worked on.

Ok, that’s it for now. Maybe more tomorrow!!