The Guilt!

I always feel guilty when a Tuesday passes and I don't have something to post here. I've been busy, but I've belabored that point. Once I have more free time, I do plan to get back on the blog ball.

So there's not much going on in my life that anyone really wants to hear about, since it's all stuff about trying to build a website and store, and make sure my associate/boss-type-person isn't using "as" for "has" all over the website, because he's English and can't help that shit at all.

The rest of my life involves conversations with my sons and ex-husband. So that's what you're getting, and you can like it or lump it (as my junior high science teacher loved to say).

As I mentioned in the comments on the groovy-ass blog Simian Idiot, my six-year-old son hates being asked questions that do not relate to precisely the subject he wants to discuss at that moment and probably for at least the next hour. His reactions range from physically waving the question away, to exasperated body twisting and sighs to facial expressions that resemble some sort of fugue.

His personality is a constant source of amusement for his father and me.

me: Did you eat dinner already?
6-yr-old: *stares into space, squirms* I don't know.
me: You don't know if you just ate a meal within the last hour?
6-yr-old: ...no. Why do Delta cargo planes never carry passengers?

Next time he wants to talk about Delta, I'll have more questions than answers.

Just this past weekend, I asked him if he was doing any math in school.

6-yr-old: Can not predict now.

His father explained this answer was due to their Magic 8 Ball. He apparently asks the thing the same question every day: "Am I going to die this week?"

6-yr-old: And it always sometimes says, "yes"!

~~~~~

Their dad just took them to Seaworld, where they sat in the splash zone for Shamu. Apparently, they avoided getting wet, which caused the younger brother (aged 5) to complain bitterly. Sounds about right for a child who was born a grumpy old man. It's 80 degrees where he lives, and he insists on wearing long sleeves. He just asked me a few days ago if I'd heard of and liked Simon and Garfunkle. When he gets home from school, he puts on a dress shirt, pants, vest and tie.

This sounds like I'm merely trying to stress a point, but these are un-embellished facts.

Little brother also likes to argue. His dad told him he should be a lawyer when he grows up, because of his love for arguing, and he for reals responded, "I do not love to argue!" But this is the same child who made a robot out of a box and named it "Robox", so we're probably not going to sell him to gypsies yet. Not even despite that he says that when he grows up he's going to open the Hitler Airport. Don't get too concerned, he also wants to open The Little Rascal's Airport.

Coffee

When I wake up in the morning, I just want some fucking coffee. I don't want to be presented with a riddle, or a project, or a game of chance. I want a hot, strong cup and 15 minutes to attempt to encourage my thinky brain to catch up with my instinctive brain, which only wants to run at the first living thing and kill it when my alarm goes off.

The Hamilton Beach Flexbrew has distinctively different ideas about how my mornings should begin.

Yeah, this is the fucker.

Oooh, I brew pots and single cups! No you don't.

We used to have a Mr. Coffee single-cup brewer and it was trusty. The Hamilton Beach Flexbrew was a Christmas gift from my step-dad to my mom, meant to clear some premium counter-space, presumably so he could fill it up with a pop-up toaster to be friends with our toaster oven. Their kitchen is a menagerie of contrapshits and accoutre-junks.

Some background: step-dad prefers to brew a pot of half-caf and for all intents and purposes, insert a straw. Mom likes a cup at a time, sometimes regular, sometimes half-caf - which always results in us having an over-abundant supply of pointless sucka MC coffee pods rattling around - but lest I divide my ire today, let's stick to talking about what I've dubbed "The Asshole of Coffeemakers".

We'll start with my lesser gripes:

• It has no fill-line for the individual cups of coffee. It has a window on the side which ostensibly is meant to show you how much water you're pouring in, but trust me, it's as useless as ovaries on a boyfriend. You gotta pre-measure that agua. Might as well rustle up a batch of french toast at 6am.

• The drip-tray doesn't remove. I'd be angrier about this if I were the one tasked with removing stale, tepid coffee from the unit via siphon. But whoever thought that one up in the boardroom definitely moonlights as a total jerk.

• If you don't press that coffee pod directly down in one dextrous, practiced movement, you're getting a crunchy coffee-ground surprise, because Hamilton Beach is a fussy mistress.

• Finally, the doozlehopper you stick the pod into has many moving, yet seemingly non-removing parts which makes cleaning some sort of Russian Roulette hand acrobatics where you wait for the day when you slice a soap-slippery finger jiggling about, if you don't have the foresight and planning to get it into a dishwasher load. But again - not my circus, not my monkeys.

Now, the real reason I'm here: getting a single, consistent cup of coffee in a timely fashion is a distant memory if you purchase this small electronic appliance.

With most of the single-cup brewers I've dealt with, you press start and walk away (or slump in a quivering, desperate heap) to wait until the machine stops groaning to know you've got some coffee. The Hamilton Beach Flexbrew expects you to walk away and go fuck yourself.

It thinks it's really clever, too - with its adorable little beep to let you know coffee consumption is nigh. It lies to you. All too often, that cup isn't even one-quarter brewed when that beep occurs. Sure, sometimes your cup is perfect, and when that rare magic happens, you tell everyone you know that you've been gifted with the only thing you ever wanted: a hot, delicious singly-brewed cup of coffee in less than 20 minutes.

I've done experiments - albeit caffeine-fueled, fist-banging German ones. It doesn't care what brand of coffee pod you use, it doesn't care how much water you've incrementally measured out - it doesn't care how desperately you beg. It is simply filled with gremlins.

So if what you desire is to be soundly dominated by a machine first thing in the Christly morning - or any hour of day, for that matter - bring a box of k-cup - any brand, as long as it's caffeinated - to my home and run away screaming with this thing. I'm going to tell my parents that fairies did it. I'll even throw in a slightly-used pop-up toaster. We're going to need the counter space when I drag up the old coffee makers from the basement.

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