When it comes to coffee, we’re very picky, but can’t afford to be snobby. We want a rich delicious taste, without paying gourmet prices. We were longtime drinkers of Cain’s coffee, but we noticed a deterioration of quality in that brand (right about when the labels stopped saying “Oklahoma City, OK” and started saying “Downers Grove, IL”), and so we started shopping around for a new supplier.

Well, after trying Braum’s 100% Arabica, we stopped looking. We’re telling you — and this is our unsolicited opinion — this is the stuff. Come on over to our house for coffee sometime, you’ll see. (Or for three dollars, go get your own bag.)

A reminder to all you bloggers out there, from Michael Bates: “If you must take your Blogger blog down, please, please don’t delete the blog! Backup the content and then delete all the entries, but keep control of the blog as a placeholder. There are unscrupulous spammers (I repeat myself) who will grab the URLs of highly-linked blogs and use that high page rank to promote whatever it is they’re trying to promote.”

I would also add that the same truism holds for all domains, not just blogspot subdomains. If you discontinue your site, and let the domain registration expire, porn merchants are waiting to snap it up.

How do you like it? Just came in the mail yesterday. Sweet, ain’t it? Phoebe shot our first pictures with it today. And best of all…

It was a gift! Dear friend and blogger PinkLogician learned from our posts that our old digital camera was in a state of disrepair, and we couldn’t buy another one, as our funds were tied up in rent and milk. So she just went ahead and mailed us her Vivitar ViviCam 3825! Of course we are extremely grateful; we were really missing the camera, and are happy to be shooting again.
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…and his blog-tracking website, Technorati, is the bee’s knees. Way better than his chief competitors in that field — namely, Google’s Blog Search and that other one. Dave is good-looking too; he looks kind of like that French actor, the one in La Femme Nikita. And on top of all that, he’s an accomplished photographer. Wow. I could go on and on.

But one especially good thing about Dave Sifry is, he has been known to check blog posts that mention him. Sometimes he even responds to them. I’m hoping this is one of those times.
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King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed -
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

[Tomorrow, Oct. 7, is the 435th anniversay of the Battle of Lepanto. The excerpt above is the seventh stanza of Lepanto, by G.K. Chesterton.]

For us, Hemi’s Pizza on 23rd Street was always one of the best things about this town. When we moved back to Oklahoma City in 2004, after a four-year absence, we couldn’t wait to celebrate with a gooey 16-inch stuffed sausage and mushroom pie, the way only Hemi’s could make it. But instead we found the restaurant closed, empty, abandoned, and there was much lamentation in the land, for we would never enjoy Hemi’s again.

Until today! Round about lunchtime, I was driving up Classen, and a hauntingly familiar awning caught my eye as I drove past. I executed a u-turn and pulled right up to Hemi’s Pizza, which had not closed after all, but only moved a mile north. I was the hero of the day when I brought home our first taste of Hemi’s in over six years. It was a good day.