I am pretty sure that I’ve mentioned before that we live in the country. This is not, mind you, some sort of mild mannered ‘country’, the buculic sort you get when live 30 minutes outside of a major metropolitan area. This is real country, honest to God, middle of no place, country – the kind where the closest thing I can get to high speed internet comes via satellite.
The upside of satellite internet is that it’s faster than dial up. The downside is… well, just about everything else. Cost, download speed, upload speed, data transfer caps (ie; why I can no longer have a live puppy cam), and weather related slow downs. It’s the weather part that got to me this weekend, in main part due to an unrelenting snowfall that started on Thursday, when I left for work in the morning, and hasn’t stopped since. This accumulation resulted in our internet service being out all weekend long, much to my despair.
On the way in to work this morning, the best thing I had to look forward to was actually having internet access again (real high speed access, no less!). I also enjoyed a last minute argument with Sean, as I was heading out the door, on one of our favorite topics – “Why do you have to spend so much money on coffee?”. This is the argument that only a non coffee drinker can ever dream up, and usually sounds something like “I don’t see why you can’t just get up in the morning and make coffee, instead of stopping on the way to buy it”. I then point out that operating complicated machinery like the coffee maker is beyond the grasp of anyone who is:
a) getting up at 6:00 am
and
b) is doing so without benefit of coffee
This is, of course, a catch 22, but non coffee drinkers aren’t wired the same way as we normal people, and so the whining just continues until I finally either throw a toaster at Sean’s head, or agree that I’ll make coffee at work. Today, I’d have been better off to go with the toaster.
On arrival (after a 40 minute drive over what is basically just a highway made out of hard packed snow), I grab some water and go to put new coffee in the basket, only to discover that whoever made coffee last apparently did so in some pre historic time period, when cleaning hadn’t yet been invented, because the basket of grinds has congealed into solid chunk of brown potting soil, covered with a fine webbing of mold and cobwebs. Yum YUM!
Time for a full cleaning, it seems – just what I was most looking forward to, first thing in the morning.
I tear the coffee maker apart, wipe it down, and run three pots of hot water and vinegar through it, to disinfect the coffee maker and get rid of all the scaly, gunky build up. Four or five rinse pots later, and I finally am ready to make a pot of coffee. I run to grab cream from the cooler, and add it to my cup of coffee, only to learn that the creamer has ALSO solidified into a solid hunk of goo.
Cursing the Gods of all things caffeine related, I grab cup and cream and head for the washroom, to dump it all out. That’s when I knocked the shelf off of the wall over the bathroom sink, tumbling paper towels, hand wash and two rolls of toilet paper into the sink full of water and congealed cream. I jumped, and managed to dump half the coffee down my pantsleg, where the chunks of cream cling to the fabric, glistening like half made cheese.
Fast forward twenty minutes, and I’ve got the bathroom pretty much back into shape, and most of the cheese curds off of my pants leg. That’s when the phone rings – it’s a cat lady (it’s always a cat lady, when it comes to Krazy Kwestion Time). She wants to know how much taurine is in sardines.
I need to point something out here – we make raw pet food, but we don’t sell sardines, or any kind of food with sardines in it. I point this out to the cat lady, and she points out that we make pet food, so should know all about all of the stuff that goes in pet food, including sardines, which are fish, and we do put salmon in our pet food, which is also a fish, and so therefore it’s all quite relevant. I fight back the urge to sob, and politely suggest she call the sardine manufacturer. She tells me, not so politely, that I haven’t been any help at all. I concede she’s probably got a point.
I can’t face anything else without coffee, so I decide to suck it up and drink a cup made with powdered ‘non dairy creamer’. This is when I learn that four or five rinses aren’t enough to get the vinegar taste out of the coffee maker.
At this point, I’m torn between putting my head down on the desk and sobbing, or just sucking it up and going out to get some from Tim Hortons. I choose the latter, but decide that I’d better dump out the coffee pot first, to stave off a repeat of the great Coffee Machine Science Experiment.
That’s when I manage to get the edge of the 3/4 full pot of coffee stuck under the edge of the basket, thereby flinging the entire pot of liquid all over my desk, the filing cabinet, the floor, my purse and my sweater.
I am so dumbfounded by this that I freeze in place for about thirty seconds, and then there’s really nothing I can do beyond shouting out “Sean, you will DIE when I get home, I swear to freakin’ GOD”. I did contemplate just getting in the car, driving straight home, and killing him with an axe, but then I remembered that I needed him to snowblow the driveway, so I’ve decided to let him live.
For now.
Oh, and I still haven’t had any coffee.
