I Am Unqualified to Brew Coffee

Evidently, the stress and fatigue of the semester is starting.  As is my routine, I prep my coffee maker before going to bed and set the automatically brew a little earlier than my alarm.  Call me a Folger's commercial but I love waking to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee.  So, I hit the snooze button a few times and really noticed the amazingly fragrant coffee aroma wafting into my bedroom.  Still hazy from sleep, I clumsily made my way into the kitchen and turned on the light.

"What the hell is that brown towel on the floor?," I asked myself aloud.  A moment later, I noticed that the same "brown towel" was curled on the counter and snaked down the cabinets to the floor. Finally, my brain caught up with what I was seeing and confirmed that it was, indeed, not a towel but my morning cups of joe.  "Nice job, idiot," I said to myself.

I can understand not putting the coffee put all the way under the brewing basket or something to make it spill out.  My coffee pot was 5 feet away, in the dishwasher.  How the hell am I going to survive being on call?

File This Under Strange

So, I've sort of talked myself off of the ledge of despair. Today, I had a technology orientation where we received our laptop and learned all of the various software programs that will make hard subject matter a little bit cooler. During the session, I met a few other classmates and had some nice conversations. After the session, me and this guy, Mike, decided that we'd grab a bite and a beer in the evening as his wife is also back home.

So, we stroll into the Second Street Grill, take seats at the bar, grab beers, and start chatting. Thirty minutes or so pass and there is lull in the conversation. In the break between topics, I take a minute to look around the bar and take in the surroundings. I recognize the guy sitting next to me: Jeremy from Atlanta, a friend, an accomplice of Dr. J3K, and a mountain-biking buddy. He is the very last person that I expect to randomly bump into on a Monday night ... at a sports pub ... in Yakima freaking Washington.

"Jeremy???"

He looks up from his meal. Stares at me and just freezes before muttering something like "What the hell is going on? Who are you?"

We were both good and freaked out for about ten minutes.

Evidently, he's here on a consulting assignment and, at this point, has lived in the city longer than I have. As we see each other mostly when Dr. James Three Thousand is in town, I'm not sure that he was aware that I was moving here. Needless to say, it was a freaky-ass thing to experience. I'm still a little weirded out by it. It is, by far, the strangest thing to happen to me in a long, long time -- excluding, of course, the incident at the hobo convention with the duct tape, squash blossoms, and commemorative Obama plates.