Bone for the dog

Cliff and I had T-bone steaks for dinner today, as well as cauliflower in cheese sauce and green beans.  Gabe always gets any beef bones we have around here, once we have the meat off them.  The trouble has been that he insists in eating his bones in the living room.  I don’t particularly like slimy bones being dragged around on the carpet.  I used to put him outside on the tie-out before I gave him a bone, but sometimes the weather isn’t fit for that.  Right now, for instance, we are having our April/May rainy season.  A few months back I decided on a compromise:  he can have his bone in the living room, but he has to keep it on a small throw rug.

It took him awhile to figure out what is expected of him, but he has the idea now.  He keeps that bone right on the rug.  Once in awhile a tiny edge will slip off the rug, but I scoot it back where it belongs and he’s fine with that.  I'm always watchful when he's eating a bone, because he does keep chewing until the bone is down to almost nothing.  I lost one beloved dog to a bone piece that stuck in her throat, and I don't want to go through that again... but Gabe loves his bones SO much!

I went to the vet today to get him a new supply of heartworm medication and flea/tick preventative, and saw a notice on the bulletin board that all dogs are going to need a heartworm test because there is now a heart worm that has developed resistance to the current preventative.  I found out Gabe won't have to have the test until this winter, so at least that's one expense I didn't have this time around.  Still... my dog cost me $125 today.  It's a good thing I like him.  He's worth it to me.  

I've always used the flea/tick preventative that you rub on the dog's back, but this time I got the Seresto collar.  The vet said that's the cheapest option, and it works for eight months.  I must search Amazon and see if it's cheaper there, so I'll be prepared if I should decide to continue using it.  

It's still raining.  Last time I looked at the gauge, it was almost on the two-inch mark.  This is what I expect in April and May, so let it rain, I say!  My tiny garden likes it just fine.  

Peace.

My morning adventure

As Cliff and I grow older, we find ourselves having an adventure of some sort almost every day.  I'm often the culprit when we can't find things, simply because of my habit of laying my stuff any old place around the house rather than actually putting them where they belong:  things like my socks, my shoes, my purse, my coat, the dog's leash... the list goes on.  But this morning's adventure had me thinking I had surely lost my mind!

Actually it begins yesterday morning; my coffee tasted awfully weak for some reason.  I tried to drink that first cup, but I might as well have been sipping on stump water.  It was horrible.  I knew I had ground the same amount of coffee beans I always use for three cups of coffee.  It occurred to me that maybe it really wasn't weak.  My tastes have changed so much in the last couple of years, that was a possiblity.  For instance, I can no longer stand to drink any cola drink:  There's a foreign taste to all of it that I never noticed until the last several months.  If I want pop (which is rare), I'll choose Sprite or 7up.  So I ground more coffee beans, making sure I got it right, then added a few more.  It was better, but still weak-tasting.  It surely must be a personal problem, right?  

I'm going to digress a bit here:  except for our disastrous few months trying in vain to keep a Kuerig in our lives, we've always used a Bunn coffee maker.  My current Bunn was purchased over ten years ago.  There isn't a lot to go wrong with these pots.  I have looked at new ones, simply because they now have a model that comes with a stainless steel carafe that also serves as the pot the coffee brews in.  I'd love to have one, actually, because I put coffee in a carafe for Cliff when he gets up.  He's pretty "stove up" (as my dad used to say) right out of bed.  It hurts him to move and it hurts him to wake up, so I make the coffee, put it in a leaky old cheap carafe, and take it to him along with his cup; he can sit there for an hour or longer without having to move.  For years I took his coffee to him in bed, but arthritis in his shoulders won't let him lay on his side to drink it any more.  

I may be a slob, but I try to be kind to my for-better-or-worse husband because he's nice to me.  

After seeing that new model Bunn that comes with a stainless steel carafe, I had thought to simply buy the stainless steel carafe to use with our old pot.  "I'll bet that carafe doesn't leak!"  So I ordered it ($39), thinking it would fit my old Bunn.  It didn't, but if you print your own return label and take your unwanted purchase to a UPS location, you can return items free.  So it's all boxed up and ready to go back.  This, of course, has little to do with my morning adventure.  So now, back to the weak coffee problem.  

I recalled a couple of times when a little screw-on thinga-ma-jig that goes up under the top of the coffee pot had clogged up from the calcium in our well water, back before we got a water softener.  I reached up to unscrew it and inspect it, and behold!  It wasn't there.

Here I was ready to make some really strong coffee, but a vital piece of my Bunn was missing,  Without that little round thing, the water comes out in one single stream and only touches the center part of the coffee grounds.  I had found my problem with weak coffee, only to realize I had a bigger one:  It was 4 AM and I WANTED A DECENT CUP OF COFFEE RIGHT THEN!  Thank goodness for the coffee pot in the garage that we use on road trips.  

I swept the floor, fished under the cookstove with a yardstick, and looked under everything that disc could have fallen into or under.  Nope.  It had vanished from the face of the earth.  I got our travel coffee pot out of the garage and made some coffee in it, but still worried over the Bunn.  I checked Amazon once the coffee was brewing in our second pot and found I could get that thinga-ma-jig for $5, so it wasn't a big problem.  These days I could replace the whole pot for $50, even though they always used to be $100.  Not the new model with a carafe, that's $100.  

Once Cliff got his hearing aids in, I told him my sad story, explaining to him all the locations I'd searched, telling him about the weak coffee (Did you notice the coffee was weak yesterday? I asked.  Yes, he answered.)

"I'll bet it fell into the used grounds and ended up in the trash," he mused.  

Why didn't I think of that? 

It wasn't pleasant, since the trash can was three quarters full and had lots of wet grounds in it, not to mention discarded bits of food and a REALLY rotten banana.  I took the whole mess outside to the trash can and searched until, right near the bottom of the trash can, I found what I was searching for nestled in cold, wet coffee grounds.  

I won't have my expensive carafe, but I'll bet if I look I can find a plastic one that doesn't leak from all the seams without breaking the bank.

Have a great day, dear readers.  May all your adventures be happy ones.  If they are problem adventures, may they be solved as easily as mine was this morning.  

Sincerely,
Donna