dynamic elf

Someone in the elevator was wearing my mom's favorite perfume this morning. She was also wearing a suit my mom would have loved -- but she was my age, which is probably the age she was when I imprinted on that perfume.

My current favorite reusable coffee mug at work looks like a disposable paper cup. I actually love drinking out of the squishy silicone lid, in exactly the same way that I love smooshy rubber keys on calculators and easy-grip handles. Occasionally it gets admiring comments, but I have to wonder if appearing to have a throwaway coffee cup reduces the quiet advocacy potential of reusable mugs in a workplace that strongly encourages the use of disposables.

aroraborealis sent me an adorable image, and now I want to paint little things like this all over:

So, my new office has one of those Keurig coffee machines where you pop a little pod into the machine and it makes you a single mug of coffee. And it's *decent* coffee, too! The pods look like this:



Each cup has a tiny paper filter inside, filled with ground coffee. The machine pokes a hole in the top and a hole in the bottom, squirts hot water through, and brews you a single mug in a few seconds. Quick, convenient, tasty, real coffee. The only problem with this system, in my eyes, is that it uses a little plastic cup every time.

So, I started poking about for what I could do about this. My first stop was these:



Perfect!, I thought. But actually, these turn out to have two main flaws: first, they only work with the smaller home systems; second, the coffee flows out quickly through the sides rather than dripping out a small hole in the bottom of the cup, leading to weak coffee. Here is the solution I went with:



These seem superior, since when you reuse a k-cup, you not only are guaranteed to have a k-cup that fits your machine, you ALSO have the coffee flowing through one or two small holes rather than out all the sides, leading to nice strong coffee. I now have a set of three very durable hard plastic lids that squish inside a used k-cup, and some (good) ground coffee in the freezer at work. I've taken a bunch of used k-cups, peeled off the foil, rinsed them out, and set them to dry on my desk, waiting for reuse. I'm brewing my coffee with trash, and it's a heck of a lot quicker and simpler than bringing my own french press to work.

No point -- I don't expect everyone to do this. I'm just a happy customer drinking precisely the kind of coffee I want, and I wanted to share the joy.

hey! I could drink decaf! I'd relegated it to my mental list of undrinkables so long ago, I almost forgot that coffee could come without caffeine.

I think coffee is making me feel yucky. I'm switching to green tea for a while... here's hoping I don't get headaches.