A carnival of technology

Yesterday, while trying to figure out what my parents could have possibly been sending from Port Allen, I realized that Community Coffee, in Baton Rogue, is in the same parish. I saw this as more an interesting bit of trivia than a possible source of stuff. I’ve seen Community Coffee around before, but I usually think of coffee and chicory blends when I think of coffee from Louisiana, a product that I’ve tackled in the past with mixed feelings. Community Coffee in particular I tend to associate with restaurants, since I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in places like Atlanta Bread Company that want to be a little like a coffee shop.

Here’s a bit from an IRC conversation last night:

23:20 < gopherdave> let’s see.. West Baton Rouge parish appears to be the home of community coffee, but I don’t think they’d get that, since both of us can pick that up at Publix

Landry’s Guns and International Piping didn’t seem like likely sources, either, so I just went about my Friday, stewing in the mystery. What I did not expect was 8 bags of various Community Coffee blends. To add to the irony, I somehow still managed to fail in not buying what they were sending in that short week: one of the coffees is from Hacienda La Minita, a pound of which I ordered from Martinez, also arriving today. Oops. The Community Coffee box included a a leaflet on the coffee-of-the-month included, a batch from the Toledo and Labateca, Columbia, so I’ll probably try that one first. This is kind of overwhelming. I don’t even know where to put all this coffee.

Thanks, mom and dad. I’ll be enjoying this for a while. Or at least a few weeks.

Midsummer’s eve is upon us, so I guess it’s my birthday now. Moshe warned me of the superstitious dangers of wishing one a Happy Birthday early after wishing me one yesterday, but he lives in the future, so I guess it’s ok.

My parents told me that they were sending something, so, of course, that’s been bugging me for the whole week. I has assumed that they would time the package as they would for my sister, about a week farther along the mail route, and I debated whether or not I’d open it when it arrived or wait until today. However, they instead shipped UPS, and the timing was meticulous. I saw an envelope in the mail today, my mother’s careful Palmer script clear even in the dark of the mailbox, but this was just a decoy card. The real goods left their evidence in the form of a UPS InfoNotice, and, according to the tracking information, it’s being shipped from Port Arthur, LA. I don’t know of anything in Port Arthur, so the only assumption I can make is that my present is actually being smuggled in from Cuba, as many convertible pesos spent on well-placed bribes as on the package itself, and Port Arthur is being used instead of Miami to confuse customs. I honestly don’t know what it is, and with my luck I won’t be able to pick it up until Monday. Thanks, Mom and Dad, whatever it is.