hello and welcome to coffee oh a very full cup of coffee with lyman today what i want to do is start
off since you know i like coffee i'm going to take you into the kitchen and show you how i produced
this cup of coffee are you ready let's begin okay so here we are i'm going to show you how to make
what my grandfather would call of course he'd call that for any kind of good coffee a goddamn
good cup of coffee it's not really the technical word name but you know okay so first got my bag of
coffee beans coffee beans and you want your coffee beans to be packaged no more than a couple weeks
ago you know you get them as close as you can but some of these companies have get my coffee grinder
but some of these companies that sell coffee beans
they'll sell them a couple months old and say that the expiration date is a year from now
well if you really want good fresh coffee you buy good coffee good coffee beans i live
in korea and this is the best i can do here for where i go shopping are these beans okay
and this particular package was just produced or packaged i should say about
i guess a month ago all right so because i'm in korea the voltage is 240.
this coffee grinder i have a little cheapy just blades inside it runs on 110. so
we turn on the old transformer go like this we're going to grind the beans
now i like my coffee strong so excuse me gotta get a spoon
and we're gonna put in two heaping tablespoons this is what koreans use for a spoon
it's a soup spoon they don't really use teaspoons and tablespoons but this is about
the size of a tablespoon two heaping and just a few beans extra because i am me it's what i do
okay right away seal up the bag so she stays as fresh as i can put the top on
and we let it grind
i don't try to make it exceptionally fine i don't want it so coarse that i got chunks of beans but
i let her go a little while here
okay that's probably good enough take the cup now notice there's no water in the cup
knock out few of the crumbs that are stuck to the lid and
here we go with this get it all knocked out you can see the blades in there
okay put the top on turn everything off and plug it from the wall
put the old grinder away and we're going to head back to my classroom and
put some hot water in the grounds so here we are in the beloved classroom this is where i teach
english one-on-one to my students of course have been that the pandemic has put a stop
to that for the last year but i'll get back to it now we've got the fresh ground coffee beans
all we need now is some boiling water let the old water pot get good and hot
i already preheated it so we wouldn't have to wait so long
i like to get it to a nice rapid boil and the aroma of fresh ground coffee beans oh my goodness
the kind i buy the company packages them from guatemala mexico peru and
that might be all i've tried all of them peru tastes the best
there we got the coffee boiling or the water boiling
so we just pour it in the cup
fill it right up to the top there you go
i let that steep for a few minutes give it a little shake once in a while and what's going to
happen is the coffee grounds absorb the water the grounds no longer can float they go to the bottom
of the cup most of them and i drink my coffee when i'm done i've got a thick layer of grounds in the
bottom of the cup and i can put some more water in there if i want to make up another cup after maybe
i've drank this one down halfway still a really good cup of coffee and it's really good cold also
coffee okay so now you know how this was made and it is delicious
now aside from coffee what i wanted to talk to you today about was a little bit of my past
and i thought i'd throw in something humorous here from the years of 1974
19 i worked in a place that was called the saint paul union stockyards company now
saint paul minnesota saint paul is the capital of minnesota
and a union you probably know what a union is right they protect the workers rights so
it was called the saint paul union stockyards a stockyard is a place where livestock cattle
hogs cows pigs sheep and calves come on truck used to be mostly by rail but in later years because
this place started in 1886 but in later years when i worked there was exclusively by truck okay now
the stockyards was quite a place it's many many acres
in the town of south saint paul minnesota right next to the mississippi river
now when this place was started that was pretty much all the countryside however
as time progressed the city sort of st paul kind of expanded and met up with south st paul and
became just one big huge city suburb kind of place and slowly squeezed out the stockyards which ended
up simply ended totally the last animal was sold in that stockyard in 2008 but i'd already left in
1984. so i worked there for 10 years but during that time i met a crew of fantastic people they
were all the guys the people who worked for the union stockyards there were about 150
of us at that time earlier days when the yards was much bigger it was about 600 union employees
and you had all the people who came there who were commissioned men those were the men who
worked in the companies in the stockyards that received the livestock and sold this livestock
to order buyers and the order buyers were people who worked for other companies whose job was to
come to the stockyards buy livestock to go to the slaughterhouses to be killed and there were
big huge slaughterhouses around the stockyards and also they were shipped out of the city to
big feedlots and far line slaughterhouses and such okay well it was quite a place when i got
out of my pickup truck in the morning i lived about 10 miles from there i started at 5 30 in
the morning and it was like you stepped back 100 years in time i wore a big old cowboy hat and
had a handlebar mustache and i was just a young guy worked there from the time i was 18 to 28.
so anyway my job was to handle the crippled livestock so any cattle or hogs cows pigs that
would come to the stockyards maybe they were sick and couldn't walk on their own they'd fall down
or they were injured they broke a leg or something my job and one other man who i worked with
on this little ford tractor with an iron trailer behind it about eight feet long was the trailer
we went all over the stockyards all day picking up injured livestock cattle would go to one or
two of the packing houses we'd take them there shoot i'd shoot them in the head with a 22 rifle
put a chain on them and hoist them up into the slaughterhouse
and away they'd go same thing with the hogs mostly sometimes we took them to pens to be put out on
trucks taken away but most of them would go to a big armor packing house it was the largest
packing house by size in i can't remember the world of the united states
right there and anyways we go up in a tractor we go up on a big cement viadock in a livestock
elevator we'd go up to the sixth floor of this huge packing house and unload all these pigs
that we had that were injured and a government veterinarian would look at them say they were
okay for people you know fit for human consumption i'd shoot them in the head they'd go up on a chain
and off they'd go and we'd leave and continue on with our job in the stockyards picking up other
animals so anyways i did that for 10 years and one of those years i actually stopped doing that went
on the night shift but then i came back to days and so nine of those 10 years that's what i did
well you meet a lot of interesting people in a job like that you might imagine there were quite a few
characters all these old truckers who'd come there every day with their livestock unload them and uh
other big semi tractor trailers would come in the other end of the stockyards and take them
out after they'd been bought and take them away someplace well a lot of guys like to play jokes
there was always some kind of a joke going on sometime i'll tell you what a skype hunt is that's
kind of a dirty joke you play in someone but today i want to tell you about a something i thought was
really funny everything started very early in the morning there we had these scale houses they were
called a scale house and what that was for the cattle and the hogs they were separate places
but there were several of them in the stockyards they'd put the hogs they'd walk the hogs down an
alley and they'd be on this great big scale giant big scale size of a room and inside
the scale house right next to the scale a person would weigh them they'd have this sliding weight
on a beam and they'd weigh them and punch a ticket well there's a fella who'd run one of those places
each day that was his job he was a called a counter and his job was responsible to make sure
he knew where all the animals went and the weights were right the paperwork was right so he'd get
to work extra early each morning and he'd sit in his scale house and basically read the newspaper
well he noticed that every morning one of the fellows who came in very early with his truck
load of livestock each day he'd come walking across the yards you know going through the gates
because everything was fences and pens fences and pins and this guy would always walk right
beside this man's scale house and the guy had on coveralls and a big coat and each time he'd stop
he'd take off his coveralls because nobody was around it was early before the scale opened right
so this guy would take a dump right there because in the stockyards there's manure dung poop from
the animals all over the place you try to keep it cleaned up but there's always a lot around so he
would take a little poop right there outside next to the scale house on the other side
of this fence nobody around nobody knew except the guy in the scale house who the truck driver
never knew he was there so this guy thought hey i'm going to play a little trick on this fella
so one morning he decided to go outside the scale house and wait around the far side of the
house and when he saw the trucker coming he saw him get up on the other side of the fence there
take off his coat pull down his coveralls and all that and squat down get ready to go
poo right next to the fence knowing that nobody was around to see him and he did it every day
well the guy from the scale house the counter he had a long handled flat shovel that they used for
cleaning the alleyways there he took that shovel and very quietly walked up around the other side
of the building where the trucker was slid his shovel under the fence and
the trucker on the shovel the guy pulls the shovel back and and just kind of stands back and watches
what happens well when this guy felt comfortable with the situation and was all done with his job
most people tend to take a peek at what they just created right whether it be in the toilet
or it was on the ground you got to take a look at that poop i don't know why but most people do that
so this guy looked and there was nothing there he was like so this fella with the shovel he was like
this is funny right and the next thing he knows the guys got his pants and he's shaking his pants
trying to he thought maybe he pooped in his pants it didn't go on the ground and this guy was look
he couldn't find it and after a while he just he just gave up put on his clothes and went away and
i thought that was one of the greatest tricks i've ever heard pulled on anyone
that was in the saint paul union stockyards so to coffee to the stockyards and to you
my that's good thank you for watching and i look forward to seeing you
again the next time goodbye for now
and as i'm enroute to the classroom from the kitchen
i thought i'd give you a quick shot of our lovely living room we have a nice view unfortunately
across the street they're going to be putting up some 15 story apartments apartment complex
all along here so our view will be blocked but it's been really nice for the past 10 years
as you can see my wife loves plants and if we look over here a little bit
what do we see more plants
so and here and here in the bedroom
guess what more plants and if you can hear the background sound of heavy equipment working
they're getting ready to put in those apartments start digging a hole they throw the old ones
down
you