How a Cup of Coffee Got My Entire House Clean

Which is why I’m about to go take a nap. I just wanted to pop in here first and explain to you the mysterious and wonderous attributes that are in a cup of coffee….

Yes, ladies and gentlemen – I will tell you the amazing story of how one cup of coffee got my entire house cleaned!

I really think that it started last night when I couldn’t sleep. With the central A/C out right now, and temperatures in the low 90s, night time is quite uncomfortable. Around 2 am it cools off enough with the windows open to relax, but before that, I find yourself laying naked on the bed, trying hard not to move and so help me if a blanket covers any part of me, with the ceiling fan on – just hoping for a slight breeze to blow your way. Sometimes around 2:30 am, during Murphy Brown on Nick-at-Night, I do believe I fell asleep.

Well, 5:30 am comes early.

And it seems even earlier when you have no coffee.

Okay, it’s not that I don’t have coffee – I’ve got a great big plastic jug of coffee – Folger’s even, Good to the last – nope, that’s Maxwell House, but I digress.

No, I have plenty of coffee, what I don’t have is sweetener.

I suppose that one cup of coffee with sugar isn’t going to kill me, even though I am not supposed to eat sugar. I guess if I get technical, doc said don’t eat it, he never said anything about drinking it right?

But, of course, I DO know what he meant. So I try to be good and not have a cup with sugar – but truth is, I’ve gotten to where I just don’t LIKE the taste of sugar (shrug). Splenda, Equal and Sweet-n-Low (in that order) are my favorites…..and I couldn’t find a single packet of it in the house anywhere (sigh).

So I make breakfast for everyone – sausage and eggs and orange juice – the whole time, that pot of coffee sitting there beckoning me, “Drink me, drink me, driiiiiiink me…”

So after everyone is off to school and work – I wanted to sit down to start working – and I find that my working in the mornings is so interconnected to sipping a cup of coffee that I cannot even THINK without a cup sitting on my desk. So I didn’t even go to my desk. I went on a search for a packet of sweet stuff instead.

I tried my dead-level best to have a cup with no sweetener. Funny, it just didn’t TASTE good. Poured that out. Then I started looking for a packet of sweetener.

First I opened the drawer where we keep all the condiments. Come on, I know you all have a drawer just like this one – the drawer in your kitchen where, when you eat out fast food you put the ketchup, mustard, salt and pepper packets. I thought SURELY there must be one packet of pink, yellow, or blue stuff in there, right?

Instead, I found two open little tubs of Taco Villa Hot Sauce and sugar ants crawling on my drawer.

Okay, that prompted a cleaning out of the drawer. Dumped everything in the drawer on the counter and wiped the drawer down, sprayed it with the ant killer, dried it and slide it back in, then dumped all the stuff back into the drawer – minus the two opened packets of hot sauce.

My quest continued. I looked in the cabinet. Figured there might be one little pink packet that had fallen to the floor or was left on the shelf. There HAS to be SOMETHING! But instead of finding a packet of pink or blue or yellow stuff, I found a potato with vines growing out of it.

Okay, perhaps I should really clean my cabinets out more often, right? So that got me started cleaning out my cabinets…a few bad potatos and a couple of alphabetized canned goods later and I’m back on my quest for sweetener – all the while that lucious strong coffee brew was just staring at me from the pot…

I looked in the fridge, but lo and behold, I didn’t find sweetener there, and really, I don’t think I meant to, but that prompted me seeing all the tupperware dishes in there that I know I probably should really clean out, especially since my partner doesn’t eat left overs…so I did. Cleaned ’em out, consolidated, merged and tossed – when I was done, I looked over at the sink and saw the dishes that are now piled up from cleaning the fridge…(sigh)

So I washed the dishes. Including my coffee cup – which I still hadn’t found a sweetener for my coffee yet!

But in the process of washing dishes, I got my shirt wet. So I go into my bedroom to change shirts, and decide to get dressed today instead of wearing my grubbies around the house all day – and there is this cute yellow spring-type sweater I wanted to wear. Sadly, it was in the dirty clothes basket in the closet. So that got me to taking the basket to the laundry room and washing a load of clothes. But I couldn’t start the load of clothes until the clothes in the washer were put in the dryer and the clothes in the dryer were taken to my room and dumped on my bed.

Well, that got me to folding the clothes on my bed and putting them up in the drawers – and that’s when I realized that the bed was still not made from this moring (although I rarely actually do make the bed – I mean, why? You’re just going to sleep in it again and it’s not like anyone but the people who sleep in this bed ever see it, right?) So that prompted me to make the bed.

And still – no packet of sweetener for the wonderful cup of coffee that I was looking for.

But by now, I was hot (remember, my AC is out?) so I go to the front room and turn on the refrigerated window A/C – I am soooo glad I didn’t sell it last year like I had planned or I’d be miserable now. I sit down on the couch to contemplate my dilemna….craving a cup of coffee now like a junkie craves a fix! I swear, my hands were shaking.

And what would appear before my wondering ass when I sit on the couch but a transformer my son left there last night – can you say ouch? Those things are pointy. So that prompted me to pick it up and take it to my son’s room – where I found all his clothes he’d pulled out of his dresser this morning on the floor. That prompted me to pick up his room.

By this time, I had to pee…don’t know why since I hadn’t had ANYTHING to drink yet – but I digress once again (is that redundant?) and so I go to the bathroom – where what to my wondering feet would appear but three sopping wet towels on the floor, a pushed back shower curtain and a half shredded roll of toilet paper – (the kittens love that stuff!) So that prompted me cleaning the bathroom floor, and in the process, I picked stuff up off the floor that was apparently SUPPOSED to hit the trash can,, but instead ended up behind it – and so I took that and the bathroom trash to the kitchen to throw in the big trashcan, and of course – it was full.

So I slip on my shoes and take out the trash.

When I come back in, I set the trash down, and I go to the other cabinet to get a trash can liner. I attempt to put the liner in the trash can, but while I’m doing this, this kittens (I have 5 – 5/week old kittens, adorable as can be, but can’t wait ’til I get to give them away next week ((addendem: we ended up keeping all 5 of the cats NOT my choice…LOL)) and they kept grabbing at the bag and clawing up my feet. That’s when I noticed they had no food.

So I feed the cats, but discovered that the food that WAS in the bowl yesterday has been partially eaten and partially spread out all over the floor, which is how the kitchen floor got swept, and I swept it into the back living room that has a hard floor, and that prompted the floor of the back living room getting swept too.

…and after that, the next logical step is to mop, right? Right.

By this time, I go to rinse the mop out in the sink and I decide the dishes I’d washed earlier needed to be put away. So I put everything up, including the spatula I’d used to make the sausage patties this morning, and that, my dear friends, is when I found it.

In the drawer where I keep the big serving spoons and spatulas – I found one packet of pink stuff – one beautiful, glorious packet of pink stuff.

So I get out my coffee cup and go to pour me a cup of coffee, and I am holding on to this little pink packet like it is my very life. That is when I discovered that the auto timer on my coffee pot had shut itself off. The coffee was cold. So I ran it back through to heat it up and poured myself my first cup of coffee for the morning…

I take the cup of coffee and come in here to sit at my desk. I take a sip, breathing in the aroma of that first morning’s cup, feeling the steam rise up to meet my face, and taste the awesome awakening power that this black brew is known for…when I glance to left of me, and what to my wondering EYES do I see?

Right there on my desk, nearly smack in front of my face, 21 – count them 21 packets of Sweet-N-Low sitting right there on my desk. If only I’d just come in and set at the desk like I always do in the morning (sigh)…

Go figger…

But THAT ladies and gentlemen, is how one cup of coffee managed to clean my entire house this morning.

It is also why, even though I found my pink stuff – that I am going to go take a nap!