So, hey… it’s been a while.
Actually, I just looked, and it appears that my last post to this blog was a little less than two years ago, shortly after I announced that I was putting this blog on hold.
Life is still crazy hectic with school, so my posts will be irregular, but I’m planning to post about something (personal) finance related once a month. Stay tuned!
Life during the last two-ish years (in a nutshell)
I cannot say/write the phrase “in a nutshell” without thinking of that goofy scene from Austin Powers. But I digress.
Updates!
- About a year and a half ago, my husband decided to make a career change, which lead to him moving back to Michigan and us living apart for almost a year.
- About six months ago, in the middle of the worst winter Michigan has seen in years (because of course it was), I moved back to Michigan to join my husband, leaving my job at College Invest, and transferring to a Michigan university to continue my grad program, by way of a three month tax-season internship at a local CPA firm in Michigan. All of our stuff went into storage.
- About two months ago, I applied for unemployment because it is very hard to find a part-time accounting job and for (long, somewhat complicated) reasons, I didn’t want to take a non-accounting job.
- About a month ago, my husband and I moved into a new apartment. Ground floor this time (she can be taught!) and in a very nice, dog-friendly community. We are very excited. Our stuff came out of storage, and is… still sitting mostly in boxes. (School. My excuse is school.)
Which leads us to…
Dead Coffee Makers
It turns out that if you pack up your coffee maker without properly cleaning it and then leave it in a box for six months through a soggy Michigan spring and part of a muggy Michigan summer, it grows an odd brown algae in the water reservoir and your coffee tastes like feet. I tried everything short of bleach to get it cleaned out, and nothing worked. So I declared it dead. We could buy a new coffee maker, but the aforementioned lack of a job for me makes even that $60 expense prohibitive. But we can’t live without coffee, so…
The solution? A stainless steel, insulated french press that my father gave me.
If you do it right, a french press can make a damn fine cup of coffee. Unfortunately, they only make one or two cups of coffee, which is really only a problem because they are such a pain to clean out. In case you were wondering, this french-press-coffee-grounds issue is actually the point of this blog post, updating you as to my life since two years ago notwithstanding. (No one has ever accused me of being succinct.)
Coffee Grounds
It turns out that, somewhere in the distant past, I bought a bunch of coffee filters for a type of coffee maker that we have never owned, never mind that our coffee maker (before it died) had a reusable gold filter. I think I saw a Pin and was inspired… Or something. The point is I have a lot of them, and no real use for them.
The thing about coffee filters: they are very good at filtering coffee. (Who’duv thought?) Yesterday morning, while longing for a second cup of coffee and staring forlornly at the soggy mass of coffee grounds in the bottom of my french press, I had a brain storm. If I put one of the aforementioned useless coffee filters in a mess strainer and dumped the liquid-y left-over grounds through it, my french press could be easily cleaned and I would be halfway to a lovely, delicious second cup of coffee.
And viola:
Worked like a charm.
