It's a Sign: December 13
In the caffeine overload of the week before the Christmas program, I find myself increasingly short-tempered, even cranky. The annual Denio School candy fundraiser is way behind schedule: our candy order, $6000 worth, has been wandering the desert in the back of a FedEx truck for ten days now. People just don't deliver out here, no matter what they say, and I have dispatched Rosie, the PTO president, and her newborn son to meet the 18-wheeler outside Winnemucca at first light. The penguin costumes for the primary class are coming along, but the Emperor Penguin needs a gold nose and bow tie, and even Walmart is a 150-mile round trip. Maybe Rosie will take care of this for me too. I ponder this and all other impending crises over my predawn coffee.
My coffee maker is an overengineered, programmable marvel upon which I have become seriously dependent. At 4:45 am, the little timer goes off. I can hear it muttering to itself as I pull on my clothes in the dark bedroom and stumble down the hallway toward the kitchen. Hopping from one freezing foot to another in front of the wall heater, I ponder the disturbing truth:
this coffepot has got to be cleaned, and soon. It used to be that only five minutes passed before the brew was done. Now it's taking half an hour. I steel myself to the task. It's only 5:30am. I have an hour before I need to leave for school.
I rummage around beneath the sink. Between the muriatic acid and the rat poison, I find a dusty gallon of white vinegar. I've been putting this little job off for months, mostly because of the noxious odor that accompanies the boiling of acetic acid, coffee scum and that scaly calcification so typical of desert plumbing. But the time is now. I fill the reservoir with the full-strength liquid. Surely it'll work faster that way. I punch the Manual Start button, and wait.
Dependably enough, that bubbling sound begins, followed soon after with the wafting of nasty fumes through the house. And then the pot shuts off. What? No, this will not do. I punch Start again. Again, the beginnings of a cleaning, but the pot shuts off less that halfway through the cycle. Once more I hit the little red button. This time, there is a sound inside the machine's sleek black carapace. The sound of a small explosion, involving something made of glass . Almost-clear boiling liquid begins to leak across the kitchen counter. It's a sign. I chuck the whole mess into the deep aluminum sink, and hope, as I drive north in the breaking day, that the new gas station in Denio has coffee made.
It must be time to lay off the caffeine. Tomorrow I'll make a pot of tea.