Apologies For The Weird Production Windows

The production window closing on January 23rd, which was a long one due to CES 2016, has pretty much sold out and shipped. The next production window will be completely open on Saturday (some slots are already up) but its going to be a short window ending on February 2nd.  “Why?” you might ask. Because my Lovely Assistant and I will be heading to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week to get the hell out of the SF Bay Area during the Super Bowl. I hope everyone enjoys the game and general festivities but, honestly, the getting around here is bad enough at the best of times. Adding a couple hundred thousand extra people means it’s time for me to be elsewhere.

As has been previously discussed here, I love me some volcanoes and doing isotope geochemistry on their rocks has informed some of my coffee palate. As my other convenient volcanoes require serious snow and winter gear at the moment,  Hawaii is the name of the game. It’s been almost a decade since I’ve been there so I’m excited to see if my golden, transcendent memories of drinking all the coffee at the Kona Pacific Coffee Co-op hold true or it was all just a dream.

So, get you orders in now for the short pre-Hawaii tip production window. The window after that will go until February 27th. Sorry for the weird production windows to start 2016 but the holidays and travel have made things tricky.

As a slice of life from bartending at my friend’s hospitality suite for the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, by far the weirdest moment was helping another friend, Fr. Gabriel, say mass. You see, the EZPR Suite is the happiest place in Las Vegas during CES as it has a well stocked bar, run by me, and a collection of wonderful people to hang out with, which happens to include a Dominican priest. Travel was badly messed up for everyone coming into Vegas so Fr. Gabriel got in painfully late and missed getting to mass at the cathedral. Its helpful to think of priests and monks as dedicated computers that run a very particular program, mass.exe, and it must be executed at least once per day; doesn’t need to be done in a church proper, doesn’t need a lot of people, but the program must be run.

It's sacrilicious!
Fr. Gabriel’s INSTANT ALTAR! Just add wine.

To this end, Fr. Gabriel has a Portable Altar which looks REMARKABLY SIMILAR to my 1960s portable bar from Executair. He was just going to use a closet in the suite, but I had the bright idea that there’s a bunch of wedding chapels in the hotel, usually unused, and maybe they’d be willing to let him use it as a quiet space. As happens a lot in my company, we got told “That’s a new one on me”, “I thought I’d heard everything”, and “No one’s ever asked that one before” a lot.

Please imagine, if you will, a fully decked out Dominican priest saying mass to himself, functioning as celebrant and congregation all in one, with an altar in miniature in the alcove of a casino chapel where they normally put the flowers and gifts. Please also imagine me, a long hair bearded ginger in shorts and Fallout t-shirt, elsewhere in the chapel trying to arrange refrigerator repair by phone at the same time. If there wasn’t a bunch of people gathered around the security monitors asking “What the fuck is going on here?” I’d be very surprised.