Usually, I don’t take blood in my coffee.

This morning though, I discovered my water dispenser has a sharp bit of which I was previously unaware.

Maybe the child safety thingy wasn’t to protect kids from hot water after all, maybe it was there to protect kids from the painful finger lacerations.

When I’m at the grocery store, buying perishable products, I’m always careful to check the expiry dates (aka Best Before dates.) I can’t afford to throw food out so I’m always very careful not to buy short-dated stuff.

Especially milk (aka half-and-half creamer). Gotta have some widener in my coffee, or it’s all hot and black and uncreamy. So when I buy my coffee milk, I am very careful to check the date on the carton. The 10% stuff is usually good for 6 to 8 weeks, and I usually go through it in 10 days, so it’s almost never a problem. Nonetheless, I always check the dates.

(I also have other rules, such as I never take the first one or the last one… the first one is half-exposed to the unrefrigerated air in the grocery store, and the last one is suspect by virtue of hiding at the back, so I always take one from the middle.)

Anyhow, so I recently stumbled onto a new conspiracy with these so-called best before dates. See, I brought home a carton of coffee milk, and put it in my fridge. No big deal. The following morning I took the carton out, and was surprised to find that the best before date said the milk was going to expire in a week. I know it said it was good for a month, when I bought it.

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Before I was just unfocused, or focusing on the wrong things. But after four Supercoffees and no food, now I am well and truly blurry.

Like some caffein can energize you, give you a little boost, a little extra oomph. But four Supercoffees worth of caffein just leads to a state of tense buzzing.

I did get three more chores done, so my yesterday-list is up to 5 out of 11 tasks completed. I haven’t started on today’s list though.

Oh and I redid the Random Words thingy so it’s really actually random now. It’s still in alphabetical order  - I didn’t want the same words appearing in a random sequence. That’s silly. I wanted random words, appearing alphabetically. And I got what I wanted.

Except that in doing so, I may have taken the concept of a ‘tag cloud’ and, you know, slightly broken it?

Doesn’t matter. Random is as random does. Stephanie is as caffein buzzzzzzzzzz.

So instead of devoting what little energy / functionality I have into something important — like housework, workwork, or that sort of thing — I’ve been using it to muck about with Wordpress & my website.

Odds are, you won’t notice anything different. That’s kind of the point actually.

What I’ve been doing was first, upgraded to the latest version, Wordpress 2.9 was just released recently. Then I have been rewriting most of the files that drive my custom theme. I also scrapped my mobilized plugin, as I’ve changed my theme to dynamically adjust itself depending on whether the viewer is using a mobile / handheld browser or not.

Not that the mobilized plugin had any problems – just that it required a secondary mobilize theme, and I kept forgetting to update that theme when I did anything with the primary theme. So finally I figured, heck with it, I’ll just adapt the main theme so it can serve both fullsize and mobile user agents.

The only visible change actually is that I got rid of the fancy tag-cloud plugin, and started using the normal built-in one. The only real difference there is the tag-cloud words don’t change colour any more. No real reason for the change, just that I felt like eliminating a plugin. I’m down to only 5 plugins now, and two of those are mine.

I could probably offload another one of those into my theme functions, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to do that.

Anyhow – still not focused on the right things. And now I’m wasting time writing about working on the wrong stuff instead of working on the right stuff. This is me paying homage to the Gods of Procrastination.

Due to a natural defficiency in my blood-caffein levels, I have to keep topping up my internal caffein with coffee. As a result, I tend to spend a lot of time in coffee-shop drive-throughs. After dozens (or hundreds) of trips through the drive-through, I’ve built up a number of observations.

Many people seem to be a bit surly to the coffee-shop staff, or at the very least, terse. This is especially the case in the morning, when I suppose they just really want/need their morning caffein fix. Nonetheless, the coffee-shop staff are not to blame for the morning, the lack of caffein in your blood, et cetera, so they shouldn’t have to suffer for it. Indeed, when you consider that their mornings started even earlier and they’re already at work, and that their main function is actually to give you the coffee that you really need/desire, they ought to be commended for their efforts rather than suffer anyone’s impatience or rudeness. I believe it was Dave Barry who once said, a person that is nice to you but rude to the waitress, is not a nice person. I think this also applies to drive-throughs.

I’ve also noticed that quite often, people treat the drive-through staff as though they weren’t really there — like automatons or robots or some such thing. Similar to an instant-teller machine. People talking on their mobile phone, catching up on their email, grooming themselves in their mirror, reading the paper, et cetera, and then only acknowledging the coffee-shop staff when absolutely necessary. Worse, when they do have to interact with the staff, their behavior shows that is so clearly an interuption in their other important activities… The folks at the drive-through window are not automatons or robots. And by the time they do have ATM-like drive-through coffee shops, they’ll have figured out how to program emotions into the robots. So best to start now, practicing being polite. After all, nobody wants spit (or machine oil) in their coffee, right?

Seriously though – Smile and be polite. Try it out! You may not see an immediate difference, after all coffee-shop drive-through staff (along with everyone else in the service industry) can also have bad days too. Just remember your please’s and thankyou’s and if they ask how you are doing or how your day is going, respond in kind and ask them. Or be proactive and ask them first. Smile! If they’ve been treated like a machine all day long, they might find it a refreshing change to be seen as a human being.

Remember – smiling and being polite costs nothing, takes no time, yet can make yourself and others feel better.

Cheers!

It seems that lately I can’t stay asleep. I wake up early, can’t get back to sleep, so I end up just getting up. An hour, two hours before the alarm. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could be productive, if I could accomplish something with that extra time.

Instead I’m tired, my head hurts a bit, and I’ve no coffee-fixings. Not that there’s anyone to blame but myself, I forgot to buy coffee-fixings yesterday.

No coffee and no sleep makes Stephanie mumble incoherently.

Hji8 jasd fn ljb. Zzzzzzzzz.

So I drag myself out of bed, bleary-eyed, and assemble the ingredients for coffee, just like every morning. Scoop in the magic powder, add a dusting of sweetener, pour in the boily water, then top with milk. Then ‘accidentally spill’ a few drops of milk to keep the Misha happy.

Blearily I get back to the living room, sit down to read my email and sip my coffee, it’s the morning routine.

That first sip of the morning…Mmmmmbleaaaaarrrrggghhh!  Why are there chunky floaty lumpies in my coffee!?  Ssssppiittttooooeeeeeyyyyy!

So I sit, contemplating the mug for a minute or two. It was like someone mixed oatmeal in with my coffee when I wasn’t looking. It was yucky. Dare I try another sip?

No, I do not. I’m now quite awake. Blech.

Now I am suspicious of my coffee, my milk, and my kitchen in general. Were there buggies in my coffee? Lumpies in my milk? Some creepy crawly in my water? Something residing in my mug?

Sigh.