All I wanted was some coffee
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.
Oh no! As a non-coffee drinker, I can’t sympathize with the having no coffee part, but I’ve definitely had one of those days! Hope you get some coffee in you soon.
As for getting up to make coffee in the morning, you could try a coffee maker that has the ability to be programmed; you just put the grounds in before you go to bed, set it to brew at a certain time, then when you wake up, coffee is being made or has just finished!
.-= Kari´s last blog ..Snow, Ice, Robins and Belle =-.
I call these “I suck at life days” I had one yesterday. Bleach v. favorite sweatshirt (not good), wrong ingredients in supper (gross), broken glass & broken bowl (at least they weren’t mirrors), and mysterious keyboard malfunctions (first only the bottom two rows would work and suddenly, the non-working rows began to work, but the working ones ceased, today the only keys that work are printing double letters).
Today is better though hopefully your tomorrow will be!
Sean needs to be punished. You should have saved the curdled cream for him and cooked it into his dinner.
I would bring you a big freakin’ cup of coffee myself if I were anywhere close. These heathens just don’t understand.
PS – I can’t believe you don’t have him TRAINED yet. When I say “I’d like to stop for coffee,” Ken starts looking for the next exit. He KNOWS.
Coffee is sacred.
.-= Hope´s last blog ..Help those in need =-.
Jay and I returned from a Family Trip (NOT a mythical “vacation”, I’ve learned that when you have small children, THEY get said “vacation”, parents get Family Trip) with some version of either a cold or pneumonic plague. So we crawled into bed and I had a large glass of ginger ale on my nightstand, which was cluttered with various important pieces of paperwork that should have been filed away and photos, not to mention a stack of hardbacks right next to the table that I needed to shelve.
So at 2:00AM, loaded with bendryl, I reached for a drink, spilling it on everything.
And proceded to lie there for at least three minutes debating weather it was worth getting up to try to save anything. Eventually I did shift, my string of expletives woke Jay who opted to help rather than be killed in his sleep.
As for coffee, well, I have been on a first name basis with our local coffee establishments and employees since we first moved here. I brew coffee only when my in-laws visit because they are so addicted that the 20 minute round trip to buy it is far too long.
We DO have one of those coffee K-cup brewers now, purchased for us by the in-laws to shorten the wait for coffee in our home. It’s not bad! This is the beast http://www.keurig.com/officecoffee/officepro.asp?mscsid=ULQ1WCS4X7C49KLBHUV74V43NX1T52CE
And even if you leave a used cup in it, I can vouchsafe it cleans up very easily! 🙂
Been there…done that…own the video. And I don’t have the excuse of illness or drugs, I’m just a damn klutz!
Luckily Ken is a klutz, too. We joke about buying carpet that is the color of Diet Dr. Pepper mixed with coffee. I’ve killed countless keyboards by spilling sodas and coffee into them. And I recently poured a HUGE cup of joe into my laptop — just a month before my accidental damage coverage expired (nyah, nyah Dell!)
When we had my bulldog Lucie, who was fawn and white, sometimes she had extra fawn patches – because I spilled coffee on her. NOT A JOKE.
There are splashes on my hallway walls from when I have tripped carrying coffee or tea. NOT A JOKE.
Ken doesn’t dare tease me, though – 2 weeks ago he slowly and carefully drove into a concrete pillar inside a parking garage. I sat there thinking “he’s going to swing around it now…he’s going to swing around it now… he’s – ” CRUNCH.
I was hideously, comically clumsy when I was pregnant. Last time ’round, I was showing a white dog.
Spaghetti sauce+pregnant me+white dog=red and white dog. As he got to eat the spaghetti marinara, he was pretty happy until the emergency bath.
My car has more coffee stains than I like to admit to.
But freshly spilled coffee does drown out wet dog smells! 🙂
Seriously though, husband and I have an agreement. If I say I need coffee, it’s a prediction of future events, not a simple statement of desire. 😉
I was hideously, comically clumsy when I was pregnant.
Yes, well, you’d assume that would have worn off by now, considering my kids are both in their twenties. Apparently not.
Also, number one reason why I do NOT show my own dogs? I once walked into a pillar while doing a down and back.
Number two reason? Once dropped a dog (Tessa, actually, in six to nine puppy class) while attempting to put it on the grooming table. Judge caught her, and handed her back, and suggested “Perhaps some more practice might be in order”. The judge happened to be Anne Rogers Clark.
Before you have your own, nobody tells you you won’t get your faculties back after having kids. It’s a conspiracy, I’m certain of it.
I haven’t walked into a pillar (yet), but I have
-fallen backwards over a dog
-walked into a table while showing
Anne Rogers Clark was always a pleasure to show under. I can just hear her making that comment in my head right now!
I can totally hear her saying that in my head. 😛 She was a class act.
.-= Cait´s last blog ..Latest Commission – Sable Pomeranian =-.
“Ken doesn’t dare tease me, though – 2 weeks ago he slowly and carefully drove into a concrete pillar inside a parking garage. I sat there thinking “he’s going to swing around it now…he’s going to swing around it now… he’s – ” CRUNCH.”
When Jay and I were first married, we had a little Toyota Sunraider class C RV. After getting chewed out for commenting on how close he was getting to some objects, I sat passively while he drove confidently under a large tree branch. Result, cabover bunk no longer weather proof, 6 inch diameter tree branch on hood of RV and the next two nights in hotels.