The dangerous quest to a perfect cup of coffee (subtitle: I’ve forgotten everything I ever learned in Chemistry)

So it turns out I have allll the ingredients for a perfect frothy cup of coffee right here, at home, except the correct amount of stamina, it seems.

After resurrecting my old milk umm… ‘frother’ with a fresh set of AAs the other day I realized that the key to actually making milk foam with it is making the milk hot. It just never occurred to me that milk steamers do this too. (Although after 3 years of chem you’d hope the idea that steam is very hot water would have sunk in) Anyway, having had this realization, I proceeded to plop a mug of ye ol’ cow juice into the microwave and got brewin’ on my coffee. When the stuff was done I managed to be extremely smart for the second time that morning and in a horrifying sequence of events (I touched the mug, then screamed) managed to burn myself quite badly. Forgotten chemistry lesson of the day number two: When you heat things up, they become hot. Also, hot things are HOT.

When I had finally managed to fluff up the milk and begrudgingly spooned the froth into my coffee mug, my mood was down in the basement, bordering rage against all consumable substances. To be fair, I had not actually had any coffee yet, but in retrospect it still doesn’t justify needless discrimination against what is otherwise quite a nice category of things.

In my dazed state I couldn’t even manage to turn on the automatic focus on my (wayyyy too fancy and technical for me) camera and had to angrily do the focus manually.

That first hit uh… I mean sip of coffee felt darned good, I tell ya.

love

I haven’t written in a while.
I don’t know why I say that every time; after all you know it yourself. So really I don’t need to repeat it, but I still feel apologetic about my lack of posts either way. But what can you do, when the muse is visiting other people?
Work has been tough. Doing an internship is thankless and hard and nobody gives a damn about you. Well I shouldn’t say that. At times some of my coworkers have been incredibly kind to me. But I’m like a kid dragging her mom through the candy shop yelling “more, more, more!!!”
Everybody I love is so far away so I’m kind of starved for love. That’s probably the reason why it’s so hard to see the value of those little nice things people do. When you’re starving you become extremely narrow-minded. With insatiable hunger your eyes see only the things around you that are eatable. But your mouth dries up. That’s the irony of it all: if you eat too much too fast you’ll just puke it all out again, so you have to take in the food in small amounts.
Chewing something you want so much with so much patience. That’s the hardest part. Having to take such little bites, when you just want to stuff it all in your mouth and be full for one glorious moment.
It becomes worse when you’re talking imaginary food. [Yeah, I know I’m taking this metaphor quite far, too far, perhaps. Whatever, just roll with it. ] Because then you stuff your face with things that don’t exist you don’t even get the feeling of glorious fullness, you only get the nausea.
I miss my friends and my home, or what it used to be anyway.
It’s so hard to believe in something you can’t see right in front of you, but I know that you guys are there. You’re love is what’s keeping me going right now. Still, I just want somebody to hug me and tell me it’s going to be ok.