All that's brown and steaming is not coffee.

And so I learned a valuable bit of information about myself on a recent mini road trip. Some time during the past few years a slow and subtle change must have been taking place within my very cells. So soft and graceful was my dna overwriting itself that I did not have an inkling as to what was happening. And I suspect that if I had actually committed to the hermit lifestyle and just never visited any one, any where, ever again I might even have remained ignorant of this change for years, or forever.
I'm a coffee snob.
I admit this with the same slow grudging tone one uses when they admit to any peculiarity like a thimble fetish or cravings for human brains.
I don't like the idea of being a snob but connoisseur just isn't the right title. When I read the description on my coffee beans packaging when I am at home I raise an eyebrow over terms like "fruity notes", "chocolate finish", and "a hint of that vanilla creme brulee you had that one time at that restaurant when you were half smashed on southern comfort".
See, I just don't *get* all of that from my coffee experience. I just know I like my coffee strong, I like it jangling merrily with caffeine and I like it sweetened with stevia and topped off with raw milk. I prefer French roast, but if any other nationality roasts my beans that's fine, just as long as the little icon on the packaging indicates something like, "DARK! These beans are darker than Satan's soul. Good for espresso!"Not that I'm picky. It's just that I have come to know what I like. And apparently, as my taste buds have informed me loudly and with much protest on a that recent road trip, what I don't like.
Perhaps I was expecting too much from the coffee they had available at the garage we stopped off at for fuel. I know for sure I was swayed by their insanely huge coffee section that looked like it was trying to rival a Starbucks. With whipped that, vanilla the next thing and a half dozen kinds of coffee the rest, I was salivating. We had 2 more hours of driving and that garage coffee was looking and smelling mighty fine. When I emerged from their restroom I found my husband walking in confused circles around and around and around their coffee bar.
"So much....soooo much..." He whispered. So we shared a look of avarice and swooped in on the coffee cups. We squirted and spritzed to our hearts content and when I carried my as yet too hot to drink concoction back out to the car my taste-buds were dancing with un-restrained joy at the imagined bombardment of pure taste-buddery delight that was about to befall them. French roast coffee with dulce de leche creamer and vanilla creamer on top.
Maybe I was expecting too much.....maybe anticipating liquefied coffee infused dessert was wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have drank my coffee out of the little plastic stirrer like a straw but....Holy crap, it tasted like un-holy crap.
How can something that smells so good taste so wrong? You would think I had learned my lesson from the tropical mango shampoo from back in my teenage days. They should put a warning right on the bottle, "DO NOT EAT, WILL SERIOUSLY MESS WITH YOUR MIND! SMELLS LIKE HEAVEN, TASTES LIKE THE INSIDE OF A CHEMIST'S BOOT!" (by the way I am not at all embarrassed about tasting that shampoo because not only can I live the rest of my life peacefully with that little nugget of curiosity thoroughly squashed but I see so many jokes made about tasting good smelling soaps that I know I am not the only one. What I really find disturbing is what if it had tasted good? What if I had found myself glugging down a whole bottle of tropical mango shampoo whilst in the shower? It might have started me on a life long course of soap slurping and closet shampoo sucking.....a much worse thing than being a coffee snob)
Arriving at our destination, coffee cravings un-quenched we settled in to our hotel and tried the coffee in their restaurant. We might as well have scooped up some of the muddy water from the nearby Colorado river for all the coffee intensity it had. I don't like to toss words like "bland", "boring", "pale", "diabolically weak" and "disappointing" around but to heck with it. Consider them tossed and free falling about your feet. Am I spoiled? Yes. Was it coffee? I think so, if I searched hard through the brown liquid filling my restaurant mug I could catch a faint echo of coffee. Maybe they were having an off night or maybe, and I suspect this is really the case, my tongue is too accustomed to the strong dark coffee we make at home in our beloved little Bialetti and unfortunately most others pale in comparison.
We tried one more time.
We refused to go 3 days on our mini road trip with out a good coffee. We got clever. We eyed the in room coffee pot the hotel provides and unassuming little coffee grounds pod.
It was 9:30 at night and we starting to get the shakes. We needed a decent cuppa joe and we were willing to go MacGyver style to get it. Shunning the plastic cups provided by the hotel we dug out two mason jars that we had filled with tasty road snacks and already consumed. These would be our glasses.
Because we are us, meaning a little odd, we had brought our cool new portable water filter with us on the trip to show off to the in-laws. So we started filtering hotel tap water. I got extra clever and started a pot of coffee BUT assuming the worst about the grounds I only used half the water so as to make a really strong pot. We had the stevia for sweetener, never leave home without it, but now all we needed was some sort of dairy product. Once more Alan's and my eyes met and spoke the ocular language of coffee love. We tugged on our shoes and faster than you can say "did you remember to take the hotel room keycard" we were downstairs in the food court ordering up a double scoop of Dreyer's ice cream from the ice cream cart. We cackled in the elevator, cold icy cackles flavored with vanilla and mint chocolate chip. Then, like a well oiled machine Alan and I parted ways, he dashing down the hall to the ice machine to get the ice and me ducking into our hotel bathroom where this entire mad science coffee experiment was un-folding.
The tiny room smelled like the inside of a coffee shop. Alan returned with the ice and the coffee pot finished burping and bubbling the last drop.
We were ready.
Mason jar. Check. We filled it half way with dark, delicious smelling coffee.
Stevia. Check. We carefully metered out an eye dropper full, just the right amount of sweetness we knew from experience.
Ice. Check. We dropped in a handful, straight into the coffee. We were making frou-frou iced coffees in our slapped together bathroom barista bar.
Ice Cream. Check. We each ladled a small scoop of our choice on top of the chilling iced coffee.
We grinned at each other in delight. We raised our mason jars and sipped at the same time.
We grimaced.
Holy Crap, it tasted like crap.
Down the drain it went with my disappointment swirling after it. I hate to waste, I hate to be a snob but good Lord who replaced the coffee in the hotel rooms with dirt. Actually I am half sure that dirt would make a better cup of coffee than that coffee.
The next day, bleary eyed and sniffling like children who were denied their treat we hit upon a brilliant idea. We'll go to Starbucks. We'll pay the extra coinage, we'll get a strong cup of coffee, we'll consider it a vacation treat. What could go wrong? I mean besides having to listen to the lady on the cell phone behind me in line give a waaaaaay too detailed account to whoever she was talking..er....make that yelling to, on the phone about her dog's indoor bathroom habits when she is not home, what could go wrong?
Severely shaken, desperately craving a coffee I waited the eternity with a pleasant half smile that was beginning to wilt at the edges for the employee to end her marathon conversation with the customer before me and ordered our coffees.
Once more Alan and I raised our hopes like flags on a pole and sipped our coffees in tandem.
Once more we sighed. The cloud of disappointment slid over our sun of hope and our flags went limp.
Holy crap, it tasted like crap.
If it were not for my father-in-law swooping in with a bottle of instant coffee that we were able to doctor our beverages with I think we'd never have finished them.
I have a theory.
Somewhere between California and the Colorado river people only like weak coffee. That's the only way I can explain it. Either that or I have officially trained my taste buds to only be receptive to my own coffee. Either that or I have some sort of freaky super power that enables me to seek out and discover the worst coffee around.
*sigh* Let's just be truthful here....
I need one of them stickers: "My name is Tace, and I am a coffee snob."

The technologically trashy life.....

(I'd have gotten out of the car to snap photos but since they had lots of signs expressly forbidding people from leaving their vehicles I had to snap photos through our dusty windshield at the recycling place. I wonder if it's like one of those wild safari parks and a lion would have ate us if we got out?)

Today was an exceptional day. I swear I floated around on a cloud of smug satisfaction and pure superiority all day. Where ever I walked, people cast startled glances my way like lines from a fishing rod, trying to catch just what this air of mysteriousness that hung about me was.
Was it the bounce in my step?
Did gravity not cling to me with quite as desperate a grasp as it did to every one else?
Perhaps.
I know that I felt lighter, in fact it is quite possible that I floated on my way into the grocery store. Not only did we empty the garage of a car load of techno trash and recycle it responsibly today, but I emptied my brain of the responsibility and associated guilt of said accumulated pile of techno trash. The kind of stuff that multiplies shockingly fast in this *digital* and technologically advanced age we live in. And in our case, having my husband in a computer related web site building biz, monitors and keyboards, fax machines and multiple printers have a way of stacking up.
I am not the first person to suggest strange and un-seemly procreative things happening in the dark corners of our abodes where the junk stuff lives. Perhaps it's a natural combination of time and dust, coupling with the trash in the early hours of the morning when eyes are not on them, spawning new bits of wire and cables and cords and phones and hard drives and disturbing numbers of computer power supplies. The sort of things you can't point your finger at and say "A HA! You did NOT exist yesterday!!!!" Because with out a doubt you'll only get that eye brow raised, quick step back and hasty goodbyes, reaction from any witnesses. Though deep in their hearts, in the very back corner, in the crevices that resist logical thought they know.....they know what happens with junk in the dark because it happens in their garages too. But they turn a blind eye when the garage door opens and pretend it's a bit of dust that has caused their startled gasp and not the newborn piles of computer mice that lay still and silent in the light of day.
There are only so many ways to attractively stack and store 3 old computer monitors, 3 old computers and the various and out dated non-working parts to accompany each bit. Eventually it gets to the point where if you have to look at any bit of it any longer you're going to do something drastic like banish it from your life forever, or scream.
Banishing is fun, easier on the throat, highly effective and very satisfying. But I like to do my banishing legally and responsibly so I researched where to take techno trash so it could be recycled and like a shining, golden beam of light guiding me I found just the place.

(The place where we took our techno trash has free drop off the first Saturday of every month. I love free! Also look at the incredibly strange cubes of mashed together parts. It's weird but oddly beautiful because all of that is being recycled or reused in some way instead of just being buried!!)

The place we took our stuff is called E World Recyclers and they claim to recycle 100% of what can be salvaged from techno trash. They say....."Nothing Goes in a Landfill but the organics and other materials such as wood that belong there. E-World Recyclers is driving the entire industry toward a cleaner process, being the first recycler in the country able to create furnace-ready glass from CRT tubes."

Alan has commented several times about the strange times we live in. How something that still works, was once fairly expensive, like a monitor, is now so worthless you can't even donate them to a goodwill. In fact in some places you have to pay for them to take your techno trash to be disposed of properly. These things don't *age* well. Bell bottoms come back in style but old style clunky chunky monitors? I doubt it.
At this point I should say I can feel that feeling that means that at some point in the year 3421 that some person has probably dug this blog post out of the massive blog post graveyard and will chuckle at my old fashioned ways and be aghast at the notion of wanting and needing a skinny high resolution monitor when giant old style ones are all the rage and are being dug up like fossils from our old dumps and being polished and sold as antiques for a quadrillion Teractoles. (Teractoles being the planatoid currency in the year 3421)
Delivery of our car load of non-working non-usable technology trash was easy. What wasn't easy was having the dedication and resolve to set the alarm clock so we'd get up in the morning at the appointed time to deliver the car load of stuff. We hate wake up alarms like people hate calories. With a deep and abiding hate and a healthy dose of respect for their awesome power and potential.
But we did it. That and more, I finally mailed off my box of # 5 plastics I had gathered up. If you thought there were a lot of sour cream containers in that pile before.....good golly. Plus I used the time in the last couple weeks to dig out every # 5 plastic anything I could suss out and 9.50 later it's on it's way, outta my hands and off to be put to use instead of buried in a landfill.
Like I said, today was an exceptional day.
To top off my waste management and trash related day I saw something VERY interesting.

(forgive the blurry picture but when you're spying you snap photos on the move, because a moving spy is a spy that's less likely to get it's ass kicked)

Three blue bins at a local business. THREE. Even I in all my obsessive recycling insane ways can hardly fill 2/3 of our blue bin on a good day and yet they had three......
I think it may be my first big break in my blue bin thefting case. Perhaps I shall lurk closer one of these nights and with a few deft rolls and acrobatic jumps to avoid the security cameras I shall inspect the bins closer to see if any look like mine.
I see this as going one of two ways. One, they are mine and I shall exact my revenge and meter out justice Canadian style (meaning ice will be involved) or Two, I shall find out this business is really really really good at recycling and I shall bow down before them and study at their feet to learn the ways of a zero waste lifestyle.
I'll be fine with either way.
For now, I shall go down to the garage and dance in the spots where old monitors used to sit.