Well THERE’S your problem

For the last week and a half or so, maybe two weeks, I’ve noticed a problem with my coffee pot. I usually fill it up at night, so that all I have to do first thing in the morning is press the magic button, make it go. It’s a 12-cup coffee maker but I only fill it halfway, six cups, and out of that – because whoever says that’s really six cup is perhaps a dwarf, or a leprechaun – I usually get three mugs of coffee.

But lately, I’ve only been getting two. After the magic happens and the coffee appears in the carafe, it’s only filled to the line that says “4”… not the line that says “6”. The first couple of times it happened I put it down to me not paying attention when I filled the carafe with water at the sink… but after a few days, I started to get cross. How could I be doing this so often?

Then, Friday maybe, I noticed the paper towel I have off to the side of the coffee pot was soaked. I keep a folded paper towel there to act as a coaster/instant cleanup if I splash a little coffee when I’m filling my mug. But this thing was SOAKED. And I thought, so, there’s my problem! Clearly when I’m filling the coffee pot with water, I am somehow spilling about two cups worth of water! So weird, that I don’t notice that while I’m doing it!

So I made darn sure to pour cleanly and evenly, and not spill any water. And I haven’t. But the level of coffee in the pot is still about two cups less in the morning than what I fill it up to at night.

If you are now yelling at the screen that hey, maybe I have a hole in my coffee maker? You should yell that shit at me when I’m awake, because the only times I deal with the coffee pot are when I’m tired at night and filling it for the next day, or when I’m tired in the morning and only want happy magic wake-up juice. Because that still had not occurred to me.

So last night I’m getting ready to do the dishes, and I notice in grabbing the coffee cup that I’d left on the counter next to the pot that… the new paper towel I’d put down is soaked. SOAKED. Dripping, even. I took everything off that part of the counter, cleaned it, looked at the coffee pot and said, “I think you might have a leak! That explains so much!” … so I filled it like usual and turned it on, to see if it would start leaking.

It didn’t.

It ran fine. So I poured the hot water down the sink, wondered what the fuck it could be, and moved the coffee pot again so I could put down a hand towel instead of a paper towel and… when I put the towel down on the counter it immediately soaked up water I hadn’t noticed that had dripped from… somewhere… underneath the coffee pot. I picked it up high, looked underneath it, and sure enough… water was dripping out from around the seam of some logo on the bottom. The coffee maker has a slow leak on the bottom. I’m guessing just enough that from late at night when I set the pot up to early in the morning, it’s been losing about two cups of water a night. Which means that countertop is in GREAT shape now, or the side of the cabinet, or the floor… wherever that water has been going. Clearly onto my paper towels, that’s for sure!

So. Now before you worry about me, I am not without coffee this morning. Cetty and Joe had an extra coffee maker that they’d put in the studio about a year ago, and I walked over there last night and snagged it. So until I can get a new coffee pot – maybe today because I’m going into Gainesville to see belly dancing at Satchel’s tonight – I do have an interim pot (I don’t want to keep this one as my house one, though, because it’s too big for the spot where I keep it and it’s crowding everything else on that part of the counter). I think this time, since I hardly ever have anyone over for coffee any more, I’m going to get a six-cup maker instead of a 12.

It does make me a little sad to say goodbye to this one, as it’s the one we had at Hanks. We bought it about a year before we closed, to replace the one we’d had that died. And then mine died at home about the time we were closing, so I snagged this one… if you think about it, it’s had a good long life, what with Hanks being closed for about six years now. So… note to self: hit up HellMart after watching belly dancing tonight, to get a new coffee maker. Mmmmm. Coffee.