Well that's still a relief

I don't actually mean the failure of Trump's attempt at Storming of the Reichstag 2.0, but that's a relief as well.

Less important on the global scale, but my mother had a phonecall today to say that she's still due to get the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Saturday, no matter the government trying to shift them all to a 12 week interval. I'm a lot happier with that than the alternative.

Slight cock-up on the coffee front.

I have a filter coffee machine on the table by my bed - you know the sort of thing, a cafetiere that sits on a hot plate with a filter above to drip coffee down into the pierced lid. I don't use it every day, but about three or four times a week I'll brew some. I set it going this afternoon, while I was working in the other room, and after a while realised I wasn't hearing the normal drip. 

My initial thought was I'd forgotten to turn it on, so I went through to check. It was on, but there was only a tiny amount of coffee in the cafetiere, so I opened up the top, which has two wedge shaped receptacles, one inside the other. The inner one is the filter with the grounds in, the outer one is solid, with a spring-loaded plunger at the bottom, so it's open when inside the machine, but coffee-tight if you pull it out. The combination was full off coffee - the plunder had failed to work for some reason. So I jiggled it about and managed to trigger the plunger, but the sheer volume of built-up coffee came out faster than the vents in the cafetiere could handle. Coffee everywhere - fortunately half of what ran over the edge of the table landed on a stray sock which was utterly sopping by the time I noticed, the rest landed on the bag I use for wallet etc when I'm out in the chair, which hasn't been used in months, so was empty of wallet, but not of spare coins, keys, various OTC meds etc - that's  currently hung up over the bath to dry.

So of course I still wanted some coffee, and I needed to figure out if I'd fixed the issue, so I cleaned everything, loaded up new coffee, filled the reservoir and set if perking. This time I stayed in the room so I could keep an eye on it while I watched a vid on my tablet. And there was coffee coming through so I let myself get focused on the vid. But when I looked again there really wasn't as much coffee as I'd have expected, and on a closer look the slightly dished hotplate was brimming and slowly overflowing. Cue mopping up for the second time in half an hour. As best I can tell, coffee was being released, but was dribbling out in such a way a lot of it missed the cafetiere and went down the back wall onto the hotplate. And the filter and holder were again full with perked coffee. Having learned my lesson I carried both of them and the cafetiere through to the sink in the bathroom before triggering the plunger.

So at least I have coffee, but I still have to find out why the plunger isn't working. This may involve some experimenting. And towels, lots of towels.