Senior moments

Since the carafe for my Braun coffee maker was shattered sometime before last Christmas, I have been using an oversize Starbucks mug to make my morning coffee. I had forgotten that the coffee maker has a mechanism to protect the absent-minded from dripping coffee all over the counter – the carafe presses a lever under the reservoir upward when it is in place, allowing the coffee to flow out of the reservoir and into the pot. Fortunately, my mug is big enough to trigger that mechanism, the only cup in the house sufficiently tall.

A few weeks ago I had a coffee flood, over the counter and onto the floor. It appears the reservoir isn’t large enough to hold the whole two cups of coffee. Oops. I had set everything up, pressed GO, but forgotten to put the cup under the reservoir. I’ve only done that once though, having successfully formed the Pavlovian connection to “press button, check cup.” But this morning while I was feeding the cats I heard the familiar “gurgle, trickle, hiss, hisssssss” that indicates an overflow condition, and darned if there wasn’t coffee running down my counter again. No, the cup was where it was supposed to be, but I had apparently filled the pot twice with water.

I have no idea how I did that. My memory tracks through removing the cup from the dishwasher, filli…, well, wait. I might have grabbed the water as I passed the sink, and put it in the pot. Then I started getting the cat feeding implements together. Then I went back to the pot and put the filter and coffee in. Then I picked the cup off the counter, got water, and put the water in the pot. And somewhere in there I finished feeding the cats. Either that, or I started to make a pot of coffee yesterday and got distracted in the middle.

I don’t know where I lost the ability to continue one task through to completion, but this is a disturbing trend. And annoying. And exasperating. And fortunately, funny.