It occurs to me I haven’t changed my iMood from “awake” in I dunno how long, but the thing is, it’s usually right anyway.  I am awake most of the time lately.  And if I’ve fallen asleep, I don’t know it ‘cos I’ve done it accidentally… so I can’t change it, since I don’t know I’m asleep.  Right?

Makes sense to me.

The good thing, I guess, about feeling stressed and under pressure more than usual is that when I’m like that - when there’s a LOT of stress and pressure - I don’t wanna do anything BUT sleep.   I predict a lot of sleeping this week.  That may be of the good.

Thinking of Aunt B. and ‘Coma today, and everyone and anyone else who needs some extra good thoughts.

So, I didn’t seem to be able to find my way to bed nor couch for a nap Saturday afternoon, seeing as how I kind of accidentally got stuck in the Seventies and spent two or three hours downloading a crapload of Aerosmith, Nazareth, The Runaways, Alice Cooper, Ace Frehley, and KISS. Must have been the Plaid Stallions influence.

Not that I don’t already own most of that stuff I just downloaded anyway, but it seems I have gotten too lazy to pore through the CD rack, and you know, it’s just so much more convenient when it’s already on the hard drive. Plus there’s the fact my CD-ROM drive only works when it wants to lately anyway.

One of these days I’m going to write a great big scathing post about some of the artists and bands whom I’ve discovered are still charging per track via the various services, as well as some of the ones whose stuff you can’t get at all. Some of those charging per track, it’s been really disappointing to see - not disappointed because I can’t download some stuff, but disappointed in them for being that way. I know that’s a hot button issue in the music world, but I have always believed - and still believe - that those that make their stuff available as a regular download are going to make more money on those tracks than if they slap a 99 cent per on it (yep, I’m looking at you, Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others).

‘Cos you know what? 99 times out of 100, I’m gonna pass right by those. Put your 99 cent price tag on ‘em all you want. Most of the time, I’ve already got your CD sitting in the rack that I paid full price for anyway. I don’t need your MP3 so bad I’m gonna pay for it individually again. No. Sorry.

Then there’s the ones whose stuff’s not available at all. Yeah, I’m looking at you now, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

Come to think of it, though, I can think of several reasons why Zeppelin’s stuff might be a little more difficult to deal with regarding licensing and royalty issues and such, now that I’ve thought about it for a minute.

There’s plenty of others out there, though, that really just have no real good excuse and, like I said, my opinion is that many are shooting themselves in the foot as I said above. I bet more of those 99 centers on Napster, et al, get passed over than get purchased. Anyway…

Speaking of music, one of my oldest friends is subscribed to my Last.fm feed that spits out whatever I’m playing at any given time. Seriously. Subscribed. Even checks it on whatever handheld Web-capable whatever he carries around with him. Because I know this, sometimes I make a point of playing about a dozen really goofy insane tracks just to mess with him.

I have to talk to you about something Elvis-related, too, but that’s going to have to wait ’til I’m a little more awake ’til I have my very late dinner and get my head back on straight again. I should go finally did nap. For a little while far too long and way too late, which means I’ll probably be up all night but that’s okay. (Obviously, I initially penned this post before said nap occurred hit me like a ton of bricks and rendered me unconscious for most of Saturday evening.)

Unfortunately no, nothing entertaining and charged with carnal delights has kept me away the last couple of days. And it’s amazing how one can be away less than 48 hours and fall SO behind. Sorry I didn’t post pics as promised Friday night; truth is, I fell asleep… which, if you hang around here much, you know that’s a better thing than my usual M.O.

Let me catch up a bit and I’ll be posting a bunch of stuff shortly.

I think I will just stay insane from now ’til Sunday.

I fell asleep AGAIN! And at the desk once again, and my left shoulder now won’t move (well, without an EXTREME amount of pain) from being all crunched up in the chair all night long.

I am so screwed. I’m trying to get some freelance work done right now with a deadline this morning (which I should be able to finish in plenty of time), but then I’ve got to get a number of things together so I can be prepared for some desperation shopping this afternoon, and have to be ready to leave the house in plenty of time later this morning for more REAL desperation shopping this morning for the office Christmas luncheon. This is the second year in a row they have scheduled that on my day off, makes me so happy.

I wish I had gotten some REAL sleep and in bed last night, ‘cos by the time I get done running around today and get back home I may be comatose. And I really, really, really need to do some more stuff tonight. There is SO much that needs to be done before Sunday.

I’m OK with not canceling Christmas, but can we just delay it another week? Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Well, first of all, the new and improved Lynnster Zone’s opening is going to be delayed just a little bit longer as I ran into a snag. That snag being that I crashed and fell asleep much of last night, without meaning to. Oops.

I’m kind of irritated about not getting further along yesterday evening but ehhh, it’ll get done when it gets done. Hopefully by Wednesday at the latest I can switch my feed and everything else to point to the new blog. I could do that now, but as mentioned earlier, you can’t tag posts over there without a full edit and my feed would be updating 300+ more times (whether now or later) without really being an update and you’d all and everyone at NIT would be pissed, so I’m going to do that first and that way it’s done and nobody wants to beat my head in.

Anyone who’s subscribed to the feed via Feedburner won’t have to change a thing, once the new feed’s ready to go I’ll swap it and you’ll never know the difference. I think most are probably subscribed via Feedburner no matter what reader platform you’re using, but if by chance you subscribed a long time ago via the regular Atom/RSS feeds, you’ll need to update the feed when I open up the new blog.

If you’re reading/feeding on the LiveJournal mirror nothing will change, though I don’t know why you would be reading over there instead regularly anyway. I mean you can if you want, but I don’t pay much attention to the LJ blog other than transferring new posts over there. (That said, I guess if you’re reading via feed it doesn’t make much difference, but I do occasionally post stuff on the “main” blog that doesn’t get put on the LJ mirror, and besides, the new blog is going to be way cooler anyhow.)

And Margaret, even though the new blog is sort of colorful, the content text is on a white background so I think you’ll be OK with it!

So, fleas. I appreciate all the sympathy. The reason I am so pissed about it is because I have made a huge effort to keep us flea-free for years and other than one I stamped out super quick when the puppies were babies, we haven’t really had an outbreak of fleas in probably 10 years. When my ex still lived here we used to fight the fleas with little success every year and it was just miserable, for us and the pets, and once veterinary medicine started coming out with all the modern flea stuff that was a lifesaver.

In fact, I have had such good luck with the topical flea crap that for the last several years, I have been able to get by flea-free with only dosing the dogs, don’t even have to treat the cats ‘cos treating the dogs keeps them gone. Our usual flea season is from March or April to October - usually once it starts freezing, the threat disappears - and never in the last several years anyway have I had to treat them after October. ’til now!!! So I’m pissed.

But what I guess I didn’t count on and think about was some of my immediate neighbors have acquired new dogs recently - on both sides of my house, matter of fact - so I figure that’s where the fleas came from, traveling over to my yard. Really I’m doubly pissed at myself because I really should have thought of that and prepared thusly.

I hope I see some signs of them going away before I leave for Christmas. Lulu’s already missing huge patches of hair on her haunches from scratching (which I didn’t notice ’til the other day either, bad mom that I am), and Dobie’s got a spot that Petey alerted me to also. But I didn’t really notice any of the pups scratching nor the cats ’til yesterday either so I’m hoping I have caught this outbreak early. I hate fleas, I hate ‘em, I hate ‘em!

And Contrary, I love you, and I realize fleas contribute to your salary and living wage; but my friend, you are a SADIST. Heh. I might forgive you for liking fleas if you will send tapeworm killer if THAT happens too. Ugh, I hate tapeworms fifty billion thousand times more than fleas. (And yes, folks, that’s how dogs and cats often get tapeworms is by ingesting fleas when they’re chewing due to the itching.)

Anyway, yes. Fleas bad. Bad, bad, bad.

Broken tooth again also bad. That’s a post/slash/rant for another time but the Cliffs Notes version is I inherited my father’s bad teeth and those thousands of dollars spent on my mouth for orthodontia as a teenager was just wasted money. My teeth are breaking at an alarming rate and there is, no doubt, thousands of dollars in dental work in my future. Now it’s one of my front teeth again and I’m so pissed about it.

This is payback and karma, I’m sure, for my horrified commentary back when the documentary on the West Memphis 3 premiered on HBO , when I bitched about how the majority of people they interviewed had no teeth and thousands of people were going to not know the difference between West Memphis and Memphis, and would assume we have no teeth either on this side of the Mississippi River. In fact, I was rather involved in a certain Usenet newsgroup at the time and spent a good bit of effort explaining the difference between West Memphis, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee for a while after that documentary was broadcast. And now my teeth are falling apart and it’s payback. And traumatizing, since I have always been kind of funny about my teeth, but the double digit thousands it’s probably going to cost to put my mouth back together is lots more traumatizing. Bad, bad, bad.

So what’s good? What’s GREAT is that I am having dinner with and get to enjoy the company of the famous, awesome, and irascible Hutchmo tonight, along with our mutual friend here in Mempho. That was just freaky to find that he not only knew and was friends with someone I know here in Memphis, but it’s someone I have known and been good friends with for 15+ years!!! That was just wild, and wonderful.

So dinner this evening is going to be a blast and I’m totally excited about it. Except since they are both really hilarious, I fear I may need to tape up my ribs before leaving the house, ‘cos I’ve probably only got like two or three ribs left to fracture from laughing so much the past week over McSmiley’s 12 Days of Christmas. Actually just one now as today’s entry has now fractured what was left.

Next on the agenda is meeting up with Newscoma either here or there in January probably, and I’m definitely plotting a trip to Nashville in January or February hoping to hang out with some of the rest of the bloggers and say hey. Also, if anyone’s free around lunchtime the day after Christmas, I might be able to stop on the way back from Chattanooga - any takers? Sista, you free the day after? No ideas where, I bet the Mothership won’t be open the day after Christmas, but if it is, a stop in Berry Hill is probably definitely in order. Or perhaps a stop Sewanee if Smiley and the belle will be there? Maybe a quick stop for coffee in Rutherford County too? So many places to go and people to see, it’ll be like being on tour, whoa. Later!

I guess I was long overdue for a crash, seeing as how I had barely slept at all for almost two weeks, but I’m kind of ashamed to admit I slept a whopping 17 hours straight this weekend. Which maybe I wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been so blasted cold (and I was happy to find it warmer when I finally woke up and got up), but anyway, yeah. I lost Saturday totally, pretty much.

Love everyone’s photos of the Mothership party that have been posted, like here and here and here and here - lots of smiling happy blogger faces there! (Don’t tell anybody but I think some of them might have been drinkin’… shhh!) But the best thing of all, by far, is here. Glad everyone had a good time, hope I get to see and meet many of you next time there’s a big get-together up there.

Ready for this one? THEY FORGOT ABOUT MY CAR.

Oh, yeah, they sure did. They forgot to tow it to the other mechanic for the electrical work. Dude didn’t think about it ’til this evening, when I guess he was squaring away all the pending work at the shop before the day was over.

I was so busy working all day, I didn’t really think about it until late afternoon and decided since I hadn’t heard from ‘em that it probably wouldn’t be fixed today, and planned to call them when I finished working. The guy at the auto shop had remembered and called me before I had a chance to call. Needless to say, apologizing profusely and planning to take care of it first thing Monday morning.

I’m really not that annoyed about it, since (A) I don’t know how much this is going to cost me yet, so that’s one less thing to ruin my weekend, (B) I can pretty much get by without until Tuesday or Wednesday or so if I have to, and (C) it’s too danged cold today to get out anyway. I can’t get away from my ceramic heater for two minutes without my fingers freezing (this house is old and cold). But still it figures that something like that would happen, always to moi. Sheesh.

Anyway, I’m in the process of resubscribing to all my feeds via one of these way cool Firefox add-ons I picked up, it’s very neat. Just taking a while, no easy way to transfer them out of my IE-based reader so I am having to manually input them individually. I am finally right now up to the P’s. I read way too many blogs. Wait, there’s no such thing as too many blogs!

I am definitely going to be checking out StumbleUpon thanks to the recommendations from Frank and Ivy. As if I need more things for time suckage, so I’ll blame them when I have no more time because I’ve wasted it all, hehe.

And speaking of time wasters, I got an e-mail notification this morning that Diner Dash 3 has been released, so there goes my weekend. Well, after I spend the next 12 hours or so in bed because (A) I’m tired and (B) it’s too cold! Well, when I go to bed anyway, which is probably going to be sooner than later because my toes and fingers are turning to ice. Stay warm, people!

Yep, I’m doing a pretty crappy job of this daily blogging thing, I know. The past two or three weeks have been really crazy and full of all kinds of roadblocks and insanely nutty stuff and I just haven’t been able to really sit down and THINK, or breathe, much less write, for a while. But I’m motivated again, really I am.

I also still have a couple of years’ worth of old Wall entries that need to get moved over here, but that’s just such a major pain in the ass, I keep procrastinating. Maybe next weekend I’ll just go buy a great big bottle of vodka or rum and mix up a pitcher of pink lemonade or make a big batch of my new signature drink and just move it all be done with it and then I won’t have to think about it (or procrastinate about doing it) anymore.

My new signature drink? Well, this stems from this past week when I flew to Houston for a wedding. Thursday night at the rehearsal dinner, before we were all seated and I was in the bar with a couple of friends waiting, I told the bartender I wanted something sweet that tastes like Kool-Aid or lemonade, and he brought me what they called a Category 5 - with five kinds of rum - of which I had two of in the course of the evening and promptly got me pretty plastered. I had a REALLY good time at the rehearsal dinner.

The next night - the wedding, and reception - I told the bartender the same thing. There was a bit of a language barrier there, but eventually he got what I was saying and went to work. So on the second or third drink I asked how he was making it. I hope I got it right - white rum, cranberry juice, grapefruit juice, sweet & sour - maybe a little orange juice but I’m not sure about the orange juice part, and I think I might be missing one other ingredient (hey, it was the third drink by then probably). Michelle says it sounded to her like a Malibu Bay Breeze or Malibu Breeze or some such, I don’t know, it just was good and that’s all I care about. Whether I can reconstruct it properly, we’ll see.

Anyway, yeah, it’s been a wacky few weeks. I did my taxes and that was unexpectedly awful - they will KILL you on the self-employment stuff but I wasn’t predicting it to be this bad this year, better prepared when that time comes around next year, I hope. And the next day (because I waited until about two in the morning on the 15th to do and file my taxes), I overslept and woke up five minutes before I was supposed to have been meeting my mother in Jackson for lunch - an hour away. And I had sort of scheduled everything around an expected call from the boyfriend, which turned out to be a depressing one because he is struggling so. Two days before all this I was trying desperately to get my new/old car taken care of, which needed a new battery and needed to pass inspection and get registered and that whole day turned out to be a comedy of errors, starting with the tow truck (that actually only wound up giving me a jump off) showing up two hours late and things just getting progressively worse as the afternoon went on. So by Saturday evening and the totally messed up events of that day, I just gave up and went to bed in a funk at 8 p.m. and slept for something like 17 hours and stayed in a bad mood for pretty much the rest of that week.

Things got better tho, and the car (shockingly!) passed inspection and I got all that junk taken care of, and then most of last week was spent preparing for the trip to Houston, which was a blast and good to see all my friends and meet in person another one who I know well but had only up to that point spoken to tons on the phone and never met in person. Because it was going to cost $200 more to fly back on Sunday instead of Saturday (what’s up with that, what happened to the whole “Saturday stay” thing with the airlines?), I wound up staying only a little over 48 hours, but it was still a fun couple of days.

And, I had never been to Texas before so that was interesting in itself, but really I was kind of weirded out. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but I was expecting it to be really different, I guess. Instead, being in Houston pretty much seemed almost no different than being in Orlando, if I didn’t know for sure I was in Houston I might have thought I was back in Orlando again. That’s weird. Even weirder, in a couple of spots, Houston looks just like Montgomery, Alabama. I dunno, I was just expecting Texas to be a lot more drastically different than it wound up seeming.

Anyway, I’m back and without a lot of stuff on the upcoming schedule so hopefully I can re-motivate myself into a daily or at least almost habit again. I’ve just been so mopey lately I was sparing everyone else the misery, but I’m much better now, at least until Andra and Troy move to Lincoln and then I’ll be throwing myself to the lions or something. He is going to get his Ph.D. and it was between Nebraska and Ohio State, and I was soooo pushing for Ohio State, for a number of reasons: one - obviously - Columbus is a LOT closer to Tennessee than Lincoln is. Two, that would have made my life a lot easier as one cousin, the music professor, is there as are my other set of future in-laws. But it ain’t about me and so they’re going to Nebraska, and I will now have NO family in Memphis at all anymore. Sigh.

OK, outta here before I get depressed again… ’til later!

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.

Well, I am really trying to do better about updating but even once