SHIRTSLEEVE WEATHER ... SOME FISH

The best smoke of the day is that first cigar in the morning with coffee, with rays slanting in through the blinds, and other than earthmoving equipment doing the needful on the main drag a few houses over, all is still.

I shut the door to my apartment mate's quarters and opened widows.
The weather is a balmy 62 degrees, no rain.
Shirtsleeve weather.

If I had a patio or small courtyard, I would surely disport myself there now, poncing around in my stylish grey robe. A rattan chair, rickety table, glass cafe ashtray, and perhaps a willow ware cup and saucer for my steaming Costa Rican. Large leafy potted plants in huge ceramic tubs.
There might be wild animals in the green stuff.
Beyond the paving tiles.

The cigar is a Nicaraguan all long-filler rolled by the gentle hands of a blind fifty year old virgin deep in the lush tropical rainforests of Estelí, Jalapa and Ometepe, where chagas disease, yellow fever, and dengue hold sway; it is the realm of the savage giant tree sloth, carnivorous and hungry.
Or something. I've never been to Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, so I don't know, which gives me license to invent all kinds of stuff.
The terms Estelí, Jalapa and Ometepe, are well know among smokers of Nicaraguan cigars, and the fourth growing region, Condega, is a little further north, and not represented in this excellent cheroot.
Fonseca. A puro, introduced in 2016.
Plasencia Cigars S.A.



When someone in a pipe aficionado Facebook group two years ago whined that the weather was so beastly cold, he hated having to smoke outside, the wife wouldn't allow that indoors, how on earth could the rest of us stand it, my growl-text response was "get a divorce!" This was, you understand, to keep him from moving to California.
Any woman who chases her husband into the snowstorm to enjoy his cigar or pipe is not someone we ever want here. Nor is the man who married her.
Both of them need to stay in the frigid zone, inhaling stale cabbage odours from the other apartments, while elderly drunks freeze in the drifts or set their urine-stained mattresses on fire.
Yeah, no, I've never been to the Midwest either.
I just imagine goofy stuff about it.
Disapproving Lutherans.
Weather.


There are no volcanoes or jungles in Kansas. Just flat potato fields, turnips, cabbage soup, and horrid little gothic churches for hundreds and hundreds of miles, plus tornadoes, bad coffee, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and malaria.


The Fonseca Nicaragua Petite Corona is a damned fine cigar. I would have probably chosen a toro instead, but this item came from a trade show as a sample, and sat in one of my humidors for over a year. It's a piss-elegant little number, dark wrapper leaf, earthy and a little spicy, slight pepper muted by a faint fruitiness. Consistent and even burn, attesting to the care with which it was rolled by that blind fifty year old virgin in the rainforests.

My final thoughts about this are that I really need a tiled courtyard or patio with large potted plants, where the neighbors cannot see me smoking because that would traumatize the poor dears.
They'd demand I go out into the snow drifts with that thing.
A pipe or a cigar, no matter, off with you!
Disapproving Lutherans.

There is no lutefisk in San Francisco.
They should all move back.
Mmmm, lutefisk!

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