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I have a coffee maker that I like quite a lot. (I gave up on cold brew coffee because I’m kinda lazy.) My parents have one just like it and I wanted to copy them. I like it because there’s no carafe – it has a holding tank instead. On the weekends I brew a pot on Saturday morning, drink half of it throughout the day, turn it off, then finish the pot on Sunday.

(Don’t call me gross, that’s not nice. Plus, Lloyd used to work with a guy who never washed his coffee mug. Ever. Save your “gross” for that guy.)

The thing I don’t like about this coffee maker is that it is unwieldy. Granted, I’m only using it once a week, but it’s once to pull it out from under the cabinets and fill it, replace it, then another time to dump the grinds. Whew. That’s too much work.

But wait! Bed, Bath and Beyond to the rescue!

I was so excited to buy something so frivolous. I didn’t even do my standard ‘walk away and see if you really want it in five minutes’ ritual. I grabbed the box and made a beeline to the checkout.

Um, it doesn’t really work for me. If I push it back against the wall (which is how I think it should be since it looks nicest), and center the coffee maker on the caddy (again, it looks nicest), it doesn’t slide out far enough to open the top.

Whatever. I decided to switch it around and use the little measuring bowls to hide the gap. (You can see it in the banner photo.) That, and the dirty plates, cups and half-eaten bag of Cheetos on the counter, should detract from it’s lessened beauty.

I just can’t abide lessened beauty.

Professor Plum, in the block area, with a tractor.

During the lazy times, I admit to relying on mac-n-cheese as the sole component of dinner occasionally. However, I dress it up with tomatoes. Pour a third-to-half a can of diced tomatoes in a bowl, sprinkle with basil and nuke for a minute or so and put on top of your serving. Viola! Fake spaghetti!

You are in two camps when in comes to this: My camp, which is full of awesomeness and has Starbursts for dessert, or Lloyd’s camp, which is stupid and closed-minded. Lloyd would rather eat macaroni out of his shoe than put tomatoes on it.

Ironically, when I was in grade school, the one side dish that I remember was macaroni and tomatoes. I don’t think there was much, if any, cheese in there, but just the thought of eating it made me want to barrrrrrrrrrfff. What has changed? In my old age will I begin to crave other things I detested?

Just a public service announcement that if you arrived at our site from Google sometime in the past few days and got some ‘virus alert’ window, you may now have a virus – from that. Booooooooooooo Google virus.

Let me have Lloyd tell you some techno-babble that might help:

We were using an older version of WordPress, and that wasn’t a good idea. Anyway, if you have the site bookmarked, if you click on a link from another website or if you type the address into your address bar, then you don’t have anything to worry about. But there were a couple of days (well, at least one) where if you searched for our site on Google, you were redirected to one of those “fake virus removal” sites.

At that point, you probably wondered what was going on and clicked the back button or closed the browser window. Those are fine things to do in that case. But if, instead, you followed the instructions on your screen, there’s a chance that you might have a virus. But not if you have an Apple computer, and probably not if you keep your Windows computer updated.

In short, you’re probably fine, but we wanted to issue a general warning.

Lauren here again. Sorry everybody.

My brain is fried. It was a long, long, long weekend of cleaning and building, but it’s all done now. Bring on the kiddos.

Before:

There were some projects besides the room and the photo board, but I’ll save them for later.