Lion and Magic Boy

During the night I noticed that my eyes felt kind of different, kind of grainy, kind of sticky. Like something was in them. Like maybe my contacts were still in. Oops. No, I distinctly remembered having the contact solution out, pouring some into the little wells of the soaking container and then replacing the lids of each side, one for “right” and one for “left”. So I definitely took them out.

Except my eyes still felt odd.

There’s one way to check that: can I see properly?

Well, it’s the middle of the night. Kind of dark, you know.

I can see the clock pretty well, but that’s because I have one with big numbers now. Right? I forget. It’s the middle of the night.

Oh well, too sleepy to think about it…

So when I woke up my eyes were fused together, which definitely meant that I had forgotten to take my contacts out. I dripped toxic liquids in my eyes until I could open them again and stared blankly at the empty wells in my soaking container, empty except for being neatly filled with soaking liquid.

Time for coffee, naturally.

There is an art, a ritual, to making coffee around here. First I fill the electric kettle and set it to boiling, then I take the clean French press out of the dishwasher rinse the remainder of yesterday’s coffee out of the French press. Next I carefully measure randomly pour some amount of coffee beans into the coffee grinder and grind for exactly eleven seconds until it sounds done or I remember to stop grinding it. I pour the freshly-ground coffee into the French press and scrape the surprisingly large amount of coffee residual out of the bottom of the grinder with a scrupulously clean special scraping utensil finger, and pour that into the French press as well. By this time, the water is boiling, because electric kettles! they rule! and I pour the boiling water into the French press and brew the coffee for exactly 5.5 minutes until I remember it’s there and it’s time to press the plunger down.

Remembering that I still had some pre-ground coffee sitting on the counter left from the Colorado trip last month that I still haven’t written about in any detail (but planning to! with pictures!), I decided to use that instead of grinding whole beans as usual.

When the water was boiling I poured some pre-ground coffee into the grinder. And then poured the boiling water in.

And then looked at it, trying to figure out what was wrong with the picture.

Yep, it’s gonna be a GREAT day. We’ll see what I can do with the remaining 10% of my brain.