Saturday Spot: Coffee…

Last week in the Saturday Spot I mentioned a couple of things around our house that are not as they seem or shall we say – they serve a different purpose. This week I am writing about something far more serious: The Coffee Machine, which serves its exact purpose. It makes coffee for us and lots of it, on a daily basis. It works nearly as hard as the mother person to keep our house running smoothly. We call it the beast.

Now I am quite a minimalist by nature and this is what I think a coffee machine should look like: classic, sleek, aesthetically pleasing and requires a little bit of ritual to run smoothly:

However the father person is a gadget man and feels a need for buttons to press and spouts to spout and grinds to be ground and such like and this is his version of the coffee machine:

Now there is a story as to how we came to own a coffee machine that costs the price of a small nation or should I say a small car – or a fancy cell phone, whatever. As a wedding gift to my husband I got him a coffee machine. He was a night owl and I was an early bird and we would need something to drag us into the same time zone. Our coffee machine stood by us well, but it required a bit of work. A little bit of ritual: beans needed to be ground, filters needed to be changed or washed and so on – a little effort was required. And for twelve years this was okay.

But all along, and here is the point… I am so rubbish at the father person’s birthday, much as I plan and desperately try to rack my brains to make this wonderful special day: I have gotten it on the wrong day, I have booked the most hideous events months in advance only to discover – oops it’s his birthday and here we are helping a second cousin twice removed move house. I dare not mention sleeping overnight on a concrete floor in a shack with sub-zero temperatures, my intention was an overnight trip to the country – the reality was a little too real.

I have planned the most awesome gifts and bought all the materials to make them only to find at three in the morning the night before that I am never ever going to finish neither do I have the cash for a quick recovery. He has received a pile of planks and a broken saw… I was planning to make him a box, only, um I didn’t have the required skills. One time he was lucky enough to get some strips of fabric – in theory it was a track suit. And through all this he stood by me and was cheerful – the man is a Saint.

Needless to say about two years ago I invested in a real coffee machine – a birthday gift for all the years gone by and just to cover all our bases for all the years to come. Boy this is a dream. You press a button: it grinds, it filters, it pours and froths and heaven. It requires nearly no maintenance toss in some water every now and then and the same for beans. The only kind of robot that I am prepared to live with. Not to mention a little plus for me is that it has a separate entrance where I can place the ground decaf coffee. No sleepless infants for me thank-you very much. I did have a nursing mum call me and ask me how I cope, she has to drink 12 cups of coffee a day to keep up with her baby that just never slept – um lightbulb moment!!! Frankly the machine is not very aesthetically pleasing to me and takes up a large part of the kitchen counter, but when it is put like this, then I am prepared to suffer the sacrifice:

Which leads to another little coffee machine anecdote: It has a place on the top where you do the bean refill thing… well hood’s 4 and 5, who are my terrible twins – not actually they are a year apart (age 3 and 4 at the time)… but man! Well they discovered how to open the canister. They were munching beans like other people eat popcorn at the movies – throughout the day. Needless to say there were a couple of days where they quite literally out stripped the neighborhood leapt up and down the walls, spun out on the ceiling and then I discovered them at their task… hmmm, problem solved. And after a little training the problem was resolved!

And here are their respective projects, regarding the coffee machine, that they have been working hard to emulate.

I can see we need to encourage them to learn how to make these machines otherwise their college funds may just end up investing in a coffee machine to be just like their hero: the father person.