So they've got to find those extra cups to fill

There was one more Mother's Day present, received Mother's Day; this one came from my father. It arrived weeks ago and my father wrapped it in this nice paper with sparkly bits all over, and which he then set on one of the living room chairs partly covered by a blanket in the hopes of keeping the cats from ripping up the paper. Despite my father's pessimism about that, that part worked. However, over weeks it did shed a lot of glitter, so that the chair now has this eerie and unnatural glow to it. The cats have been avoiding the cleared portions of the chair.

This gift was a coffee maker. An elaborate coffee maker. One of those coffee makers where you're a bit afraid to actually use it, so naturally it fell to me --- who only drinks coffee when he misunderstood the question --- to set it up. It was also one of those coffee makers where it's inside a box, inside of which are three boxes, inside one of which is two boxes, inside of which is the coffee maker, laid on its side and labelled ``this side up''. But the time spent unpacking it, largely in getting the smaller boxes out of the larger ones despite the implications of the vacuum created by tightly sealed boxes, didn't match the time spent in setup.

What threw us first is that you have to fill up the water reservoir before you can, oh, set the clock. I suppose this was designed as some kind of safety interlock where you can't accidentally program it to heat up water without there being water, but the effect was my mother and I --- I'd like to note we're both PhDs --- were watching it, unsatisfied, reporting ``NOT READY TO BREW'' for five minutes even though there was some water in the reservoir. They meant they wanted it full.

According to my mother, the coffee flavor (it also does tea and cocoa, although it came with pouches for many flavors of coffee, exactly one tea pouch, and no cocoa pouches) is excellent, but the attempts to make it turn on and brew automatically haven't worked. We certainly set up the clock by the instructions, we think, although it's possible we missed page four of eighteen or the like. I'm sure something will come of this all.

Trivia: The first tea garden to open in London appears to have been in Vauxhall Gardens in 1732. Source: A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage.

Currently Reading: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, And The History Of The World From The Periodic Table Of The Elements, Sam Kean.