One of my everyday delights is having coffee in bed with HA in the morning. We make yummy espresso drinks and they’re very good, but I suspect it’s as much about the ritual of grinding, tamping, extracting, and steaming as it is about the coffee itself.
Alas, HA is far away so I have to settle for the next best thing. It was sunny enough that the house batteries still had over 50% charge at 05:00 this morning, and I’ve programmed the load management system to heat up the hot tub in the morning when that happens. When I awoke at 06:00 and remembered that HA wasn’t here, I was glad to hear the rumble of the hot tub motor and know that I could have coffee in the tub.
First, I had to start a loaf of bread. I’m out of bread, and I’ve been so wiped out from the antibiotics I’m taking for the mother of all earaches that I’ve fallen asleep the last two nights without starting a loaf.
That done, I made a cappuccino and headed down to the tub. I opened it and slid in. It was delightfully hot. Even better, the sun was just rising over the ridge to the east. I don’t take distractions into the tub with me, and I’m not a good enough photographer to justify leaving the moment to fetch my phone, but it was a scene.
In the distance, the sun was rising over a forested ridge. It shown down across the front yard and hit a pair of cherry trees (a Brazilian and an ornamental) that are east of the hot tub. The vegetation on the cherries is already dense enough that my side of them was pretty dark, but shafts of morning light were flooding through gaps in the foliage and lighting up the droplets of water vapour above the tub. Those clouds stood out against the dark leaves.
Between the two trees, a spider had woven a person-sized classic web. It wasn’t perfect, but with the sunlight shining behind it and the sparking droplets from the 0.01” of rain we got overnight, it was striking. Then, suddenly, cascades of tiny winkling lights started falling down the trees. It took me a moment to realize that birds were waking up in the trees and shaking the water off their feathers. The shaking was in turn causing droplets to fall from the leaves, tickling other leaves until there was a light, glistening waterfall shimmering down against the dark tree.
What a way to start the day.
—2p