he said, she said

i caved.

i resisted for sooo long, but i finally watched my first episode of the award-winning tv series 24.

a few years ago, mike and i tried to watch episode 1 of season 1. we fell asleep. i figured, if it put me to sleep, it can’t be that good. i was actually quite relieved because i wasn’t ready to commit 24 x 6 (there are only 6 seasons, right?) = 144 hours of my time to this show.

fast forward to this week. my dad spent a couple of nights with us at our house. not wanting to subject him to the bad tv that mike has downloaded, i asked him to bring over some DVDs to watch. one of the DVDs he brought was season 1 of 24. (he owns seasons 1 – 6). so we all sat down on the couch and watched 12am and 1am (episodes 1 and 2). still fighting the force, i didn’t pay attention to the show. i worked on my laptop, i got up to take care of the puppies, i made tea, i served dessert, etc. — anything to take my focus away from the tv. i succeeded in not getting sucked in, but something even worse happened. mike got hooked.

i sarcastically thanked my dad for taking my husband away from me for so many hours. dad reminded me that i have nobody to blame but myself because i was the one who had given the dvd set to him several years ago. that’s irony.

last night, mike announced that he was going to watch some more 24. great. so, while i wouldn’t have to invest my time watching the show, i’d have to spend 144 hours trying really hard not to pay attention while mike watched. that was worse. ugh. so i caved. i wouldn’t let mike watch 2am until i got caught up and could watch with him.

it’s now 4am (in our world of 24).

*Twenty Four / Seven* -911 (old skool rules!)

christi has been making drip coffee in our teapot. it’s sort of silly, really. the thing with making it in a teapot is that steeping coffee is an exact science. how do you do it?

we were talking about it and she said that we really need to find a better way to make coffee. i told her, “well, we could buy a coffee maker. they are pretty cheap, you know.”

and that started a conversation about how we don’t really drink drip coffee. she drinks lattes and i drink mochas. so then we started talking about getting an espresso machine. we still have some gift certificates from bed, bath, and beyond and so it made sense.

i started to do research on espresso machines. it turns out that there’s two lines of thought on how espresso should be made. more and more, the demand in the market is for automated solutions. purists believe that espresso should be hand made, with every step of the process painfully perfected: roast beans, grind beans, brew espresso, steam milk, and froth milk.

it actually sounds like a science. i talked to my brother who used to work at starbucks and he said that before starbucks started getting the fancy espresso machines, you could tell how good a barista is by the way they made coffee.  a perfect espresso spends ten seconds filtering through the grinds.  pack the grinds too tight, it’ll be too strong.  pack them too loose and it’ll be too weak.

now things are all automated so it’s easier to get consistent coffee.

i was all ready to pick out an espresso machine at bed, bath, and beyond only to find out that the 20% coupon doesn’t apply to the model that i was interested in.  on top of that, you have to special order the unit if you want it.  that now makes me reconsider whether or not i really want to get an espresso machine from them.  oh well, i guess i should do some more research to see if there’s a model there that will suit our needs.