Sunday, October 11 2020

Dear Journal,

Good morning, everyone. Hope your Sunday is going well. I'm afraid I have some terrible news today. It was a tough call, but after much consideration, I've decided to ban Marissa from using the coffee maker.

She woke up early this morning to get a jump on her virtual art show. The night before, I set her up for success as much as I could. I thoroughly cleaned and rinse every piece of our coffee maker, setting it all out to dry on the counter over a towel. All she needed to do was assemble it, add the beans and water, and hit the big red button on the side.

This morning, snapping on the dining room lights, I stopped in my tracks to behold a coffee bar in chaos. There were dark wet grounds caked beneath the machine, on the floor, and around the brewer. Black muddy liquid pooled on the counter. The spout loosely floated on top an overflowed carafe. Flecks of brown liquid ran down the walls. It was like crime of passion committed with hot water and coffee grounds.

"I don't know what I did," protested Marissa. "I thought I did everything right?"

"I don't even think I could make this big of a mess if I tried," I pressed. "Did you use a super soaker? A garden hose? Did you stand on a ladder with a pressure washer?"

Marissa was laughing too hard to defend herself.

"I've been cleaning this up for the past twenty minutes!" I yelled. "I can't even be mad. I'm just too puzzled. And impressed. And I don't want to know what happened, but at the same time I do."

"I don't know what happened!" said Marissa. "But I'll make a deal with you. If you just drop it, I'll give you permissions to just absolutely roast me in your blog."

I took the deal. On a semi-related topic, does anyone have any recommendations for baby proofing your coffee bar? Ideally, we could have some kind of parental controls, or a biometric scanner that only heats the water if I activate it with my thumb print. I'd consider a child proof lock, but I worry that Marissa a toddler could figure out how to open it from just fiddling with it.

Marissa would have made less of a mess if she tried brewing coffee with water balloons.

When Marissa makes coffee, she leaves our coffee bar looking like Andy Dufresne did when he escaped from Shawshank prison.

Marissa handles our coffee brewing equipment the same way the bear handles Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant.

Marissa treats our coffee brewer like she's a bouncer at a casino, and she just caught somebody on the floor counting cards.

Marissa is like Liam Neason in Taken, if his particular set of skills also included turning a single pot of coffee into a war crime.

When Marissa makes coffee, she leaves our coffee bar looking like it had just been vandalized by the Dave Matthews Band tour bus.

Sip. How has your weekend been? We've been laying low, enjoying both the down time and the fluctuating fall weather. This weekend is Marissa's virtual art show. She's spent most of the time hanging out in the basement giving virtual tours whenever somebody joins her booth.

Rodney and I joined from upstairs. We shared our camera feed and microphone and chatted for a few minutes. But hilariously, Marissa noticed that the east coast craft fair crowd isn't as interested in her family as her Instagram followers.

"My viewer count dropped to zero as soon as Rodney starting talking," she laughed. "But it's OK - everyone also leaves my room whenever I show Ollie, Ziggy, or Miles."

Speaking of her Instagram followers, I shudder to think of what would happen if they were to see what she did to our coffee bar this morning. Instagram would probably get a flood of "disturbing and offensive image" reports and she would be banned from the platform. I wish I could show you a picture, but I can't find a site to upload it. The scene of how she left our coffee bar was so disturbing, it was even taken down from LiveLeak and World Star Hip Hop.

Leaving her stream open, Rodney and I just wrestled our bed through the morning. Even though our microphone and camera were disconnected, he still tried to give her play by play commentary of the action.

Sorry, I thought of a few more. Marissa's coffee bar is scarier than Shelob's Lair in Lord of the Rings. How about another movie fact? Although it's never shown in the film, the "evil" from Birdbox is actually just a photograph of our coffee bar after Marissa has finished using it. Did you know Marissa's coffee bar inspired the score for Requiem for a Dream? Coincidentally, her coffee bar also looked a lot like Jared Leto's arm at the end of Requiem for a Dream.

Do you remember the alien from the movie Alien? This morning, our coffee bar looked like the inside of the alien's mouth. It looked like the bottom of the well from The Ring. Marissa's coffee bar looked like Sylvester Stallone's face at the end of Rocky IV.

After a weekend of eating out, I thought it would be nice to reset things and make some vegetable soup. With Rodney's help, I diced up shallots, carrots, celery, green beans, and parsnip.

"What's parsnip?" asked Rodney.

"It's kind of like a carrot - only spicier," I replied.

After a curious sniff, Rodney pit the end of a parsnip, thoughtfully chewing it. "No dada," he said defiantly. "It's not spicy. It's tasty."

This was also the first batch of soup I've made with homemade chicken stock, and it made for a noticeable improvement.

"I really taste a difference," said Marissa.

"I do too," I said. "I'm still weighing the effort against the value of making homemade stock. I don't think we could outright replace store bought stock, but we have enough off cuts and chicken bones to make a batch every now and then."

Thanks for stopping by today. Hope you have a wonderful day. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to keep chipping away at cleaning our poor coffee bar.