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Mystery solved. History revisited.
Jun. 28th, 2021 11:07 amAs anyone who's ever dealt with me before around 8 a.m. can attest, I am not a morning person. These days, my un-morningness is being tested even more because Eleanor, with her much-reduced hours and totally-reduced use of ZZZSleep, has moved the start of those mornings to well before 6. To be fair, she is taking care of many things I usually did when I was more often the first one up, including doing the morning feeding of the 5,000 four four-pawed ones, and making the morning pot of coffee. Yes, we still do it the old-fashioned way at home; none of those K thingies but an old-school carafe with a Melitta cone and filter, pouring just-boiled water over the mix of Fancy and Folger grounds.
While I've had sentience issues in the mornings for most of my life, it's only relatively recently that I've become That Guy you see in all the I Need Coffee memes. Worse, it's approaching superhero status:
That's because they do have those K-cup machines in both of my offices, and every cuppa comes out fresh and just-right hot.
I wasn't always this way- and neither was the coffee.
----
Growing up, I wasn't much of a coffee drinker, and the mud on offer largely explains why. The 'rents went with an ancient method and recipe, brewing the stuff in a metal percolator. Originally it was done on the stovetop, eventually replacing it with an electric one, but the measure never changed: one scoop for every cup, "plus one for the pot." That likely explained why I grew so much hair on my chest from the few times I did give in to the stuff.
Dorm life didn't change caffeine consumption that much at first: we weren't allowed such contraband in the rooms, the electrical circuits being limited to one small "hot pot" we could plug in for a cup-a-soup or a quick blast of Joe. I avoided the stuff for most of my first semester (the industrial dining-hall Bunn machines weren't much better), but one late all-nighter in the room got me into the corners of Mom's CARE package to find the hot pot and the stash of coffee she'd sent for me....
Sanka instant coffee. Worse, decaf.
Thanks, mom!
The next year, we moved off campus, and my roommates taught me how to make a better cup. I also came into a far better percolator from my sister: a compact but quick Farberware electric that, with proper measurement, began producing the elixir I now hold so dear. We took it with us when we moved back on-campus for junior year, courtesy of the Missing Link's high placement in the dorm lottery. That got us a full-on apartment, once reserved for the head resident family supervising the dorm back in loco parentis days and now just rented out to shlubs like us. It had a full kitchen and no limit on wattage or cooking utensils. We even rigged our own fake version of a Mr. Coffee timed machine to have that best part of waking up smell (but without the incest;) - we simply plugged it in to a 24-hour timer, we'd load it up with fresh grounds and cold water the night before, and the wake-up aroma would waft right on time around 8 a.m.
And then we left Ithaca for Christmas break and forgot to unplug it.
The good news is, we didn't burn down the dorm. The bad news is, the sludge on the bottom of that percolator, burned and reburned at least 25 times over the ensuing month, was the kind of thing HAZMAT teams were invented for. Jim came up with a Melitta and a tea kettle to replace it, and that's been my method ever since.
----
I rarely have trouble getting to sleep no matter how much, or how late, I've gotten into the coffee beans the previous day. The bigger issues are when I'm interrupted in the middle of the night by noise, animal movement or need to pee- both in terms of how groggy I am when first rising and, often, how difficult it can be to fall back to sleep. Zoey started her usual morning routine of blind-rattling and circumnavigating the room around 3 this morning, and I've been mostly up ever since. But it was several nights before that led to the mystery finally solved:
Friday morning, 1 a.m. Ray hears the call of nature, safely nestled between eight paws of differing genuses. Lights are left off; he knows the way. About three or four rings into nature's call, he suddenly feels a cold, wet and slightly sticky sensation at his feet. Sound waves confirm: no, he didn't miss the bowl. But what was it? Long before the bathroom renovation began in earnest, we had a problem with the vent over the throne leaking if it was monsoon-level raining outside; but we had that fixed a couple of years ago and the problem's never returned. Was it back? Did some other two or four-legged resident spill something? Was Ray just hallucinating the whole thing in that semi-catatonic barely-awake state?
Ray grunts twice and heads back to bed, but the mystery makes the effort nasty and short. Again, the beast stirs, this time carrying a towel and turning the lights on in the bathroom to investigate. The floor is completely dry.
By morning, I was genuinely convinced I'd dreamed the whole damn thing. Then, two nights ago, there was a near-miss that cleared it up. The dog and cats share a single water bowl, which over its life has moved from the kitchen to the bathroom proper to, since the reno began, a spot just outside the bathroom in front of the linen closet. Around the same time and awakened by the same call around 1 Sunday morning, I walked into the bathroom, narrowly averting stepping in the water bowl. Which, particularly after four kibble-faced varmints drink out of it, does produce water that has a slightly sticky quality to it.
Maybe I should just start pouring the leftover coffee in there before bed. At least that way I might be more awake when the next overnight disaster befalls me.
While I've had sentience issues in the mornings for most of my life, it's only relatively recently that I've become That Guy you see in all the I Need Coffee memes. Worse, it's approaching superhero status:
That's because they do have those K-cup machines in both of my offices, and every cuppa comes out fresh and just-right hot.
I wasn't always this way- and neither was the coffee.
----
Growing up, I wasn't much of a coffee drinker, and the mud on offer largely explains why. The 'rents went with an ancient method and recipe, brewing the stuff in a metal percolator. Originally it was done on the stovetop, eventually replacing it with an electric one, but the measure never changed: one scoop for every cup, "plus one for the pot." That likely explained why I grew so much hair on my chest from the few times I did give in to the stuff.
Dorm life didn't change caffeine consumption that much at first: we weren't allowed such contraband in the rooms, the electrical circuits being limited to one small "hot pot" we could plug in for a cup-a-soup or a quick blast of Joe. I avoided the stuff for most of my first semester (the industrial dining-hall Bunn machines weren't much better), but one late all-nighter in the room got me into the corners of Mom's CARE package to find the hot pot and the stash of coffee she'd sent for me....
Sanka instant coffee. Worse, decaf.
Thanks, mom!
The next year, we moved off campus, and my roommates taught me how to make a better cup. I also came into a far better percolator from my sister: a compact but quick Farberware electric that, with proper measurement, began producing the elixir I now hold so dear. We took it with us when we moved back on-campus for junior year, courtesy of the Missing Link's high placement in the dorm lottery. That got us a full-on apartment, once reserved for the head resident family supervising the dorm back in loco parentis days and now just rented out to shlubs like us. It had a full kitchen and no limit on wattage or cooking utensils. We even rigged our own fake version of a Mr. Coffee timed machine to have that best part of waking up smell (but without the incest;) - we simply plugged it in to a 24-hour timer, we'd load it up with fresh grounds and cold water the night before, and the wake-up aroma would waft right on time around 8 a.m.
And then we left Ithaca for Christmas break and forgot to unplug it.
The good news is, we didn't burn down the dorm. The bad news is, the sludge on the bottom of that percolator, burned and reburned at least 25 times over the ensuing month, was the kind of thing HAZMAT teams were invented for. Jim came up with a Melitta and a tea kettle to replace it, and that's been my method ever since.
----
I rarely have trouble getting to sleep no matter how much, or how late, I've gotten into the coffee beans the previous day. The bigger issues are when I'm interrupted in the middle of the night by noise, animal movement or need to pee- both in terms of how groggy I am when first rising and, often, how difficult it can be to fall back to sleep. Zoey started her usual morning routine of blind-rattling and circumnavigating the room around 3 this morning, and I've been mostly up ever since. But it was several nights before that led to the mystery finally solved:
Friday morning, 1 a.m. Ray hears the call of nature, safely nestled between eight paws of differing genuses. Lights are left off; he knows the way. About three or four rings into nature's call, he suddenly feels a cold, wet and slightly sticky sensation at his feet. Sound waves confirm: no, he didn't miss the bowl. But what was it? Long before the bathroom renovation began in earnest, we had a problem with the vent over the throne leaking if it was monsoon-level raining outside; but we had that fixed a couple of years ago and the problem's never returned. Was it back? Did some other two or four-legged resident spill something? Was Ray just hallucinating the whole thing in that semi-catatonic barely-awake state?
Ray grunts twice and heads back to bed, but the mystery makes the effort nasty and short. Again, the beast stirs, this time carrying a towel and turning the lights on in the bathroom to investigate. The floor is completely dry.
By morning, I was genuinely convinced I'd dreamed the whole damn thing. Then, two nights ago, there was a near-miss that cleared it up. The dog and cats share a single water bowl, which over its life has moved from the kitchen to the bathroom proper to, since the reno began, a spot just outside the bathroom in front of the linen closet. Around the same time and awakened by the same call around 1 Sunday morning, I walked into the bathroom, narrowly averting stepping in the water bowl. Which, particularly after four kibble-faced varmints drink out of it, does produce water that has a slightly sticky quality to it.
Maybe I should just start pouring the leftover coffee in there before bed. At least that way I might be more awake when the next overnight disaster befalls me.