summer
Dixie Zen :: Oxford American
It’s hard to overemphasize the passivity of tubing. It is sloth ingeniously disguised as adventure. Though you are outside, you may as well be in your living room watching television.
Filed under: the South.
THE MINUTE I GET HOME FROM WORK
Best Room Fan | The Wirecutter
Just in time. The Wirecutter is wonderful.
How To Make Cold Brew Coffee
It’s June in Texas, which means my wife just made me my first mason jar full of cold brew coffee.
Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home….But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes.
Bonus: recipe for New Orleans Cold Drip coffee.
This is also the season for cold-brew iced tea. Same method, folks. Just sayin’.
Why not try a formal picnic for a change? – Miss Manners
Hear, hear. The fact that this seems novel and exciting is telling:
The motto of informality is: “Let’s do things the easiest, most convenient way and never mind how they seem, because nobody is paying any attention, anyway.”
Formality says: “Yes, it does matter, and the surrender of individuality to high group standards is a trivial sacrifice to the overall beauty of the thing.”
At a formal picnic, people do not wear exercise clothes, serve food in packages from the store, eat wandering around whenever they feel like it or treat bits of paper as napkins, cardboard as plates and plastic as flatware.
Food is served on non-absorbent materials, to be eaten with unbreakable utensils, and the fact that a table cloth, napkins, dishes and cutlery will have to be washed afterward is accepted as one of the burdens of civilization.
[…]
Dress does not begin with a surrender to the heat, but the optimistic, if vain, idea that one can rise above it, so to speak. Gradual reactions, such as fanning, forehead mopping and the rolling up of sleeves or baring of feet to dangle in creeks, are considered more exciting than just starting out by sweating into one’s gym suit.
