Welcome to February! 14 days and counting to that holiday I most love to hate, and 45 days until I turn… gulp… 40. Horrors. You know, I’m not really that bothered about it, tho… yet. 30 didn’t really bother me. 35 didn’t bother me at all. Now, it’s legendary among my former co-workers what a difficult time I had with turning 25… that really, really bothered me for some reason, to an obsessive point. 30 in comparison… piece of cake. 40 - well, I don’t really know yet. Although one thing does bug me, this is one of those times I wish the boyfriend and I were the same age instead of me being two years older.
Just learned some shocking but pleasant indie music news early this morning… for the first time in seven years, Dig is playing a live show! They’ll be at the Viper Room in Hollywood on Thursday, February 16th. I don’t usually have a lot of L.A. envy, and when it comes down to it I prefer Northern to Southern California anyway, but dang, I wish I could go to this. Anyway, yeah, if you’re where you can go, by all means. Tickets are $12 (also available in advance at the Viper Room website) and Dig will go on about 11 p.m.
Wanna see something cool I’m getting? Lynnster was a good girl in 2005 (and 2004 and 2003) - see what you get when you’re good and behave and play nicely with other children? Yeah, I got plans for that spiffy new Dell Inspiron 9300, all right. Couldn’t be coming at a better time either ‘cos the DVD drive in my desktop has decided to cease cooperating.
Today was like the worst dragging day in the world… it’s terrible when you start out at 7 a.m. thinking “just let this day get over with” and spend the next ten and a half hours thinking just about nothing but that. That inadvertent nap last night was a bad mistake - I didn’t get that sleepy again until it was almost too late so, consequently, I only got about an hour and a half of in-bed sleep last night, so I’m sort of still clinging to the sides as far as awakeness and alertness. But tomorrow’s my day off so all is well.
And I have thus far managed to not take on any unabsolutelynecessary work this week. I think I really need to - that is, take the week off side work - this week, don’t you think? As long as I don’t get any calls Thursday or Friday, I’m home free and then I can get back to regularly scheduled snowing myself in come Monday. But even if I do get called for some work, at this point it’ll just be one job, not so much to deal with, so that’ll be okay.
I just know that I’ve spent the last two days spending most of the mornings typing with one eye open and if I closed them both even for a few seconds, I was in danger of slipping into a coma. Gotta get some rest and regroup.
And now for our next topic - coffee. Most people know, and especially those that know me personally, that I drink entirely too much coffee.
Once upon a time, this wasn’t always so. My coffee habit actually started in church when I was a kid - around nine or ten or so - I started having a cup of coffee after church with everyone else, which soon after led to coffee at home on Sundays with Dad and the Sunday Commercial Appeal and Tennesseean. Which eventually led to other days off/days home from school, which eventually led to pretty much every day in college and when working. I guess the reason I also put entirely too much creamer and sugar or Sweet ‘n Low in it is ‘cos I started drinking coffee at such a young age.
But for years and years and years, save for the occasional after-dinner coffee when out to eat, I was strictly a morning coffee drinker (morning being a relative term of course - since I frequently don’t get up until noon or later unless I have to, just consider those mornings “extended”). Anyway, on a normal day, regular work day, what have you - by noonish I would switch to Coke and that would be that, until morning came again.
My later round-the-clock coffee habit, I totally blame on (1) my dad and stepmother and (2) Millstone coffee. It only took one visit to my dad’s for that “hmm, coffee in the evenings…” thing to take root - they were, naturally, round-the-clock coffee drinkers. And at the same time Millstone had just come out with all these awesome flavored coffees. So it would be, like, regular coffee in the mornings or at least the first pot, and then flavored coffee the rest of the day. I have flirted back and forth with the flavors - especially all the divine stuff at Coffeeam.com, oh god - in recent years it’s been mainly regular coffee with the occasional flavored pot once in a while.
Which brings me to my next topic - coffee makers. My parents bought what was a really high-tech for the time and nice Mr. Coffee coffee maker around 1976 or 1977 or thereabouts. That was the coffee maker I ended up taking with me to college in 1984 and they probably wouldn’t have even gotten rid of it except Black & Decker had just come out with the Spacemaker line and they wanted to get one of those, so I took the old one. And continued to use it until somewhere around, I think, 1990 or 1991, when it finally bit the dust. That was OK tho - that was a good 14-15 years of use out of a coffee maker, I’m not gonna complain about that (especially now).
Well, you’ve heard the phrase about how “they” don’t make things like “they” used to? There’s nothing more true when it comes to coffee makers. I am going to throw out a ballpark figure here and my guess will probably still be too low, but I would estimate I have been through no less than THIRTY coffee makers since 1991. Maybe even forty. And remember, for a significant period of that time I was NOT drinking coffee day and night - but still, I was killing coffee makers left and right. This has, of course, been exacerbated tremendously since I did start drinking coffee night as well as day.
But yeah. Oh, listen, it doesn’t matter what it is. Every brand imaginable, every price range imaginable from dirt cheap to rather pricey - I’ve killed it. This was especially painful with the Go Vols orange Salton I got for Christmas one year - I HATED throwing that one away - but yeah, just like the rest, it died. There have been occasions when the whole thing just appeared to have given up the ghost, but especially in the advent of my all day and all of the night coffee imbibing, naturally what happens most of the time is I wear out the heating element.
So last year after having killed two more in record time (two in less than two months, they were cheapies tho), my mother and I started trying to figure out ways to solve this ongoing dilemma or at least make it better. Besides me stopping drinking coffee, that is, which ain’t gonna happen anyway.
For a little bit I was considering maybe investing in an institutional one, like some of the various heavy duty Bunns there have been at various places I’ve worked over the years. On a trip up home, shortly after I’d killed another one, Mom and I are walking around the Paris Wal-Mart trying to decide what to do - at that point I had just killed another Black & Decker and had an emergency 4-cup coffee maker run out and grabbed at Walgreen’s in the middle of the night on that occasion stashed at home - I ended up coming back with another Black & Decker that time, and that one, granted, lasted me ’til about the six-month mark, it just died a couple of weeks ago and I now have replaced it with another full size off-the-shelf bought at Walgreen’s. Hey, in the middle of the night and when you don’t live anywhere near a Wal-Mart or Target or K-Mart, you gotta do what you gotta do when you know that, while you might could do without the rest of the evening, you can’t possibly function in the coming morning without coffee.
Of course, that’s funny in itself - I am of the opinion that after all these years of coffee, and drinking cokes since I was very very young, caffeine really has no effect on me. It certainly never keeps me awake, seeing as how I’m about half narcoleptic anyway. But I really don’t care to chance finding out what happens when you take the caffeine totally AWAY, and don’t think you want to witness that either.
So anyway, at the time we were shopping and trying to decide what to do last year, we looked at the Home Cafe - the superfast one-cup coffee maker - thinking, well, since I burn out the heating elements on a regular basis, maybe that’s a solution to the problem. Then we walked a few aisles over and looked at the price of the coffee pods for the Home Cafe. And we discussed at the time how someone should come out with a pod thing of some sort that you can, like, fill up with your own coffee (in my case that would be the Kroger in the dark blue although I have recently switched to the red). In any case we decided at the time that, financially speaking, that wasn’t really a great solution either.
Fast forward to me being home for my grandmother’s funeral and hey, my mom had bought herself a Home Cafe, though I didn’t really pay attention to it at the time other than to notice it was there and I guess commented on it.
Fast forward again to Christmas Day when I open, first, a Home Cafe of my own - and then, the Presto MyPod… which you can fill up with your own coffee. So, cool.
Now, another thing I should add about the Home Cafe is that I thought those were a really dumb idea when they came out. I first saw it when, shortly after its release on the market, it was featured as part of a reward challenge on Survivor. I mean, I thought, yeah, nice idea for those who like really fresh coffee (I could generally care less, I’ll stick day old coffee in the microwave, no problem) or don’t drink that much coffee, but for me? No.
Well, since getting the Home Cafe for Christmas, I have had sort of a love-hate relationship with it. I tried to use it exclusively for a week or so until finally deciding it was just too much trouble and going back to using the regular coffee maker generally and the Home Cafe on occasion.
Plus there was something about the cups made with the Home Cafe. They just weren’t tasting quite exactly right. It was kind of like when you’re outside and drink water straight out of the garden hose, or something? Yeah.
So fast forward again, this time to last week. Now, admittedly, I drink so much coffee I just don’t really have much of a discernable palate at all for it other than I can tell the difference between a really bad cup of coffee (like the stuff you get out of vending machines) or one that’s satisfactory, and that’s generally about it, really.
Anyway, for whatever reason I made a cup with the Home Cafe last week and… it tasted like the best cup of coffee I ever had ever in the world. And then, having duly noted I’d made that with the Kroger Red, I shortly thereafter made another with the Kroger Blue just to see. And it was yummy too.
So now I’m sold on the Home Cafe, totally. I guess maybe it just needed to get used and “seasoned” or something, sorta like one does with cast iron skillets. Still using the regular coffee maker too, of course, but using the Home Cafe more often than I was. Now let’s see if I can get thru 2006 without having to buy yet another one, of either.
I racked up on other coffee at Christmas too, got a bag of Starbuck’s beans as well as some yummy stuff from the beloved Coffeeam.com, including Banana Hazelnut - definitely a dessert coffee, it’s almost too sweet and coming from me who dumps tons of sweetener in my coffee, that’s saying something - and the rather amusing 5 lb. bag of Rainforest Crunch. Do you know how BIG a 5 lb. bag of coffee is? Yeah, my mother didn’t really realize it either until they (she ordered herself one too) arrived.
In other coffee news, Daisy has become such the coffee creamer addict, stalking me whenever I’m doctoring up a new cup to see if I’ll spill any. The other puppies will too but it’s mostly her, she’s the one with a bad jones for coffee creamer.
Hey, I mentioned Survivor up there and, what do you know - the new season premieres tomorrow night, yay. Although I guess I still have a rep as a reality TV junkie and trash TV-aholic (long live Melrose Place!), my interest in both has kind of waned, plus I just don’t watch that much TV period anymore. But I still get excited about the Big Three - Survivor, Amazing Race, Big Brother. Yeah, reality TV addict always… just on a bit smaller scale these days.
