Lots of excitement on Saturday morning — a coffee pot disaster and the "baby
alert level" bumping up to orange before falling back to yellow again by the
afternoon.
First off — the coffee pot thing. The normal morning routine around here is feed the cat, then make the coffee, and then whatever else. This even applies on Christmas. Breaking that routine can be hazardous to one's health. And feeding the cat comes first, otherwise he bugs the shit out of you and stays underfoot while you're working on the much more important task of coffee. So Saturday morning I found Martha sleeping on the couch (she tends to wake before me, head for the living room, and then fall back asleep), so I became the designated coffee officer. If you've never fallen into the rhythm of making coffee in the morning, let me assure you it quickly becomes easy enough to do in your sleep. Some mornings, in fact, that's exactly what I do. This wasn't one of them.
I fed the cat and went to it. Rinse the pot if unclean (which is usually the case), fill with water, filter in, coffee in, water in, start. See? Pretty simple. There was nothing any different this morning. The pitch of the coffee pot's gurgle changes when it reaches the end of the cycle, so if you listen for it, you can know instantly when it's ready without having to go back and check. Another part of the morning routine is the checking of the Internet to see what events transpired overnight (because we must bombard ourselves with information now, not have it delivered in morning and afternoon chunks when the newspaper arrives). This activity meshes well with waiting for the coffee and listening for the different gurgle. Multitasking, even on a Saturday.
I guess I had about six browser tabs open when I heard a strange sound coming from the kitchen, kind of a hissing bubbling sound. The cat had already finished his breakfast and was in the middle of his usual post-meal cleansing, and he stopped and glared into the kitchen like there was a wild animal on the loose. I decided it was probably time to investigate.
The coffee pot was full only up to the two-cup line, grounds swirling inside, and there was water hissing and spurting out around the base of the coffee machine. I lifted the filter lid to find it nearly running over with water, grounds everywhere, and steam billowing out. What the?
I turned off the coffee pot. Obviously a major malfunction. But, there was some drinkable coffee in the pot if the grounds could be filtered out, and it continued to slowly drip down from above. I let the damn thing drain and attempted to pour the grounds-filled swill through some filters and into cups. This is, of course, when the phone rang... making it even more of a challenge.
The ringing phone woke Martha, and once she discovered what was going on in the kitchen, she suggested filtering it through our recently-purchased French press. Ah, perfect! During the great 2009 Winter Blackout, I vowed to buy a percolator so we could have the morning coffee without being dependent on electricity. Lisa C proposed a French press instead, and since I never found a non-electric percolator anywhere, I bought a French press a few months ago. We even used it one morning recently when we woke up to no power. It worked just fine then, and it worked just fine to filter out the grounds yesterday. I made a second, smaller pot and everything did exactly what it was supposed to — same thing today. I have no idea what the hell happened.
The phone rang off the hook most of the morning with people calling in birthday wishes to Martha. And after one of the hundred or so phone calls, she hung up and said, "That was Melissa. She thinks her water broke."
Martha called me with that same news about herself a little over five years ago, and she phrased it in a similar manner: "I think my water broke." My reaction then was, "You think your water broke. Isn't that something you can be pretty sure about without having to think too hard about it?" Apparently it's not. That seems weird to me. I mean, I don't have a uterus or anything, but I kind of know how pregnancies work, and I kind of know the baby lives in essentially a bag of fluid until it's time to rock and roll. And there's a stork in there somewhere too. So... yeah.
Anyway, this news quickly spread far and wide and caused a great commotion, and we all waited to hear something a little more definite. A few hours later, an update: It was a false alarm. And again, no idea what the hell really happened, and everything proceeding normally again.