Exciting night! Zeke’s second front tooth came out tonight. After several days of wiggling and talk of pliers and strings and door knobs, he finally gave it a little yank. His tooth is under his pillow waiting for the tooth fairy to come. Then he’ll have to wait 3 years to find out the real scoop on the Tooth Fairy in our (DreamWorks’) movie The Guardians of Childhood.

Posted by bruce as kids at 10:21 PM UTC

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Zeke surprised me tonight at bed-time by choosing Go, Dog, Go! as the book to read, volunteering to read “the first few pages” and then reading the almost half the book! (Up to “The sun is up. The sun is yellow.” for those intimately familiar with it.)

Now, I did read this to him several times a day for several months (literally!) when he was two and the pictures help cue his memory (“the blue dog is on the red tree”) but I could tell (or at least he did an excellent job pretending that) he was reading the words. Sounding out “around”, for example.

I was surprised because although he’s been interested in reading, he hasn’t focussed too much effort on it, preferring puzzle games, math, science experiments, animals, art and sports. Cool!

Posted by bruce as kids at 1:08 AM UTC

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Thursday afternoon, I made about 40 espresso-based drinks for the animators at PDI/DreamWorks!

Someone at DreamWorks wanted to do something special for the animators and the idea of a coffee hour and my name came up. I agreed to do it because it sounded like a nice opportunity to serve the animators as a barista rather than as a software engineer. So, I packed up and took into work: my espresso machine, grinder, a bunch of “The Boss” espresso beans from Barefoot Coffee Roasters, some Ghirardelli chocolate syrup, soy milk and whip cream. Like I said, we made about 40 drinks — lattes, cappuccinos, espressos and a few mochas — in an hour. Whew! Don’t know how good they were but they looked good coming out.

I say “we” because I recruited a couple team mates (Chloe and Vishwa — thanks!!) to steam milk for me which made it possible. I also needed to get an extra double portafilter basket so I could have two portafilters going. It let me prep (grind, dose, tamp) the second portafilter while pulling a shot on the first.

Overall, it was fun but a bit tiring — nothing a little shot of The Boss couldn’t fix

Now that I read the description of The Boss, I’m not surprised that I like it. It contains some Papua New Guinea, Brazilian and Ethopian beans which is similar to a home roasted blend I’ve recently created and enjoyed which had 3oz of Brazilian, 3oz of Ethiopian and 2oz of Sumatra. Cool!

Posted by bruce as coffee at 5:35 PM UTC

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