Just Another Relaxing Weekend.

Up early, doing laundry by 6:30 a.m., then Costco and Target and Publix and haircut (it's official: I pay twice as much for the dog's haircut as my own) and running my ass off around town taking care of errands. Tomorrow, housework! A little light vacuuming and bathroom cleaning, because I need to unwind.

Of course, some of my over-exertion is self-inflicted, and I blame Mr. Coffee.

Mr. Coffee has never been a great coffeepot, but he did create warmish brown coffee-like liquid and didn't talk back. At 5 a.m., that's enough. But lately Mr. Coffee has had an Embarrassing Personal Problem. Perhaps he had an enlarged Mr. Prostate, I don't know, but he began piddling randomly on my kitchen counter. Not every time I made coffee, mind you, so at first I blamed myself - maybe I overfilled the pot somehow - because, yanno, I've only been making coffee for over 30 years - and I thought it was a fluke. Then it happened again, to a lesser degree. Then again. Then today I just realized it was over - Mr. Coffee never quite thrilled me, if you know what I mean, and this was just too much. He's gone. I'm young(ish), I'm vital, I need a coffeemaker that can keep up with me and not need Depends. Not that I'm projecting my ideas about men onto the coffeemaker or anything.

So Costco yielded a sexy black Cuisinart coffeemaker. (Read nothing into that unless you are Jesse L. Martin. If you are, email me.) I read reviews and this sounds like a good machine for the price, and it is attractive on my kitchen counter.

I'm just not enough of a coffee snob to spend more than $60 on a coffeemaker. I admit it, my standards are kinda low, if it tastes good to me I just don't get the nuances. (I'm the same way with wine and yarn, thank God.) This is actually a $75 coffeemaker, but Costco is Costco, and God bless them.

So I brought the new baby home, and tried to decide where to put it, and realized that my kitchen has a lot of wasted space and Mr. Coffee had been pissing on prime real estate, because I set up the kitchen two years ago in a frenzy of I Have A Kitchen Again and didn't plan well. So that launched a Massive Cleaning and Countertop Rearrangement Project, which yielded a new home for the new coffeemaker, relocated the toaster oven and other things, and cleared a nice stretch of countertop real estate for actual cooking. Imagine.

Yarn content: This week's mail yielded two catalogs: Webs and KnitPicks. (I'm not linking, if you don't know them, Google.) KnitPicks had nothing that floated my boat. WEBS, however, has some intriguing stuff that is appropriate for my resolution to have an appropriate Florida stash (because today it was in the high 70s and HUMID). Hempathy from Elizabeth Lavold. (I'm on the laptop people, it's so slow my daughter calls it Old Bessie, and links are a bitch.) Go to www.yarn.com and look. Yardage: good. Price: Very reasonable. Fiber content: Says Florida. Turquoise: My color. I gotta get me some of this.

But the one that really got me was Longmeadow from Valley Yarns. You mourners of the defunct LB Cotton-ease: Doesn't it have Cotton-ease-ish-but-better written all over it?? Better color pallete too. Love the lettuce.