I’m not a farmer, but I come from a family of farmers; my Dad graduated from the agriculture program at Cornell by shoveling horse manure between classes. One of my subscribed YouTube channels featured a segment this spring where they revived an abandoned tractor and a bunch of planting equipment and put corn in on their fields in Iowa. Well, it’s harvest time, so they dragged a 50-year-old combine out of a barn and brought it all in. Mechanical equipment like this is fascinating to me; luckily they chose to use a combine that ran two years ago instead of trying to refurbish a completely broken-down unit, so things went smoothly.

I picked up some inexpensive watch bands from an outfit called cheapestnatostraps, and finally found a strap that makes my Vaer diver look better. The straps it shipped with are pretty garbage in terms of style: a black rubber dive band that takes cues from the crappy rubber bands of the 60’s, and a thick nylon band in a khaki-adjacent color that never felt right and didn’t look very good. I got a leather NATO strap in a medium tan that pairs well with the face, and after trimming about 3/4″ from the end with an X-Acto it fits perfectly. They’re currently out of the color I really want, a darker distressed brown, but this will do nicely until that comes back in.

I’ve been playing with different way of brewing coffee for the past couple of weeks, and I haven’t found the right science yet.  At the risk of sounding like an insufferable coffee asshole, I’m trying pourover with some French paper filters, and so far the results haven’t been that great. I’m looking to get a better flavor than the dishwater a French press has been providing, even though I’m paying a premium for good beans, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m using a plastic funnel in place of a $50 Chemex coffeemaker, but it might be that I need better filters. I did learn that my water wasn’t hot enough and that I need to let the funnel breathe as I pour; next I’ve got to grind the beans differently. More experimentation is required.