Spring Miscellany

Spring is upon us! How do I know? I walked around my soggy, melting backyard today and picked up six (6) gallon-sized buckets of dog poop! Next lifetime, I get goldfish. And a mansion. And staff.

Rosemary's Baby has discovered a fun new game. He sneaks into the boiler room in the basement, climbs up onto the water heater and turns off the tap. When I go to turn on the hot water in the kitchen and nothing comes out, I panic for a few seconds, thinking the well's dried up. Then I trudge down to the basement to turn it back on again for the umpteenth time. Honestly, it's like living with Curious George. It's no wonder that monkey's roommate dressed like an escaped mental patient.

In other news, I have figured out something wonderful! Last week I returned my new Tassimo machine. After months of wanting one, I finally just decided I deserved a treat and bought it for myself. But it took approximately two minutes for me to realize that each coffee comes with a side order of guilt, in the form of the disposable t-disc. My options were as follows: toss the t-disc and spend all day worrying about the environmental impact, or slice open the t-disc, scoop the grounds into the compost bucket, clean out the packaging and recycle it, which completely ruins the convenience aspect of the whole product. In the end, I felt a huge surge of relief after I'd just boxed it back up and gotten my money back. But now I was missing that nice, easy cappuccino.

The Captain has a "restaurant-grade" (you'll want to put on a snooty nasal voice when you read that) cappuccino machine, but it takes half a day to warm the thing up, and it's kind of messy to use, so I just prefer to stick with my simple, no-fuss automatic coffee maker. But the coffee maker obviously doesn't make delicious cappuccino. I'm really not picky in this area though--a little coffee with some hot milk and foam is really all I'm looking for here, so I set about figuring out the easiest way to heat up my milk, get it all foamy and combine it with a regular cup of joe to make a pretty decent version of a cappuccino. My brilliant solution involves these everyday items (please ignore the hard water stains on the measuring jug):

I haven't used that manual egg beater since the Captain put it in my Christmas stocking about ten years ago (in the Captain's defense, I had made quite a production beforehand of talking about how my mother had one and how it was my favourite toy as a kid). But it turns out that when you plop that thing into a jug of microwaved skim milk and give the crank a few quick turns, you get some AMAZING foam! Check this out (and again, ignore the stains on my mug):

Who knew?! So now the egg beater and jug sit permanently on my counter right next to the coffee maker, and I'm lounging around every morning, faux-cappuccino in hand, congratulating myself on saving hundreds of dollars on the Tassimo AND not having to heat up the Captain's fancy kitchen equipment. I really should have my own show on cable.