What's Going On:

We have a fancy brass espresso machine, which is a story unto itself, that produces neat discs of used coffee grounds when you are done.

I usually bang the discs out of the coffee basket into the sink and then put them into a small galvanized zinc container that I couldn't figure what else to do with. It came with plants in it. Anyway, when the container is full, I dump them out onto one of my hydrangeas in a long-term, casual experiment to see if the flower colours will be different from the other hydrangea that does not get the coffee grounds. Making the soil around a hydrangea more acidic changes the colour from pink to blue, or vise versa, or so I have been lead to believe. So far the experiment is still in the inconclusive stages.

Many of the coffee ground pellets fall apart in the sink, so I just wash them down the drain. Why else do we have a garborator there, or as it is so coyly referred to in California, the Insinkerator, or under sink garbage disposal unit. Do not try to google garborator on Google.com, by the way. It wants you to look up carburetor instead. You need to go to Google.ca and then you will have hundreds of results. I was hoping for thousands, but it is a sparsely populated land, and we are not given to writing about household appliances. Until we move south, that is.

I know you're not supposed to use these infernal devices, as they add tons of organic content to the water system every year, thus further complicating the lives of countless fishes. But, what? A few coffee grounds. Besides, I read somewhere they help keep your drains clear. This avoids the use of truly toxic chemicals. So it's all good, right?

Our first garborator died shortly after we moved into our house. Plus it was scarily noisy. We happily trotted off to Home Despot to buy a replacement. We couldn't find one anywhere, so we asked the nice young man, "Where are the garborators?" thus plunging into the nightmare world of California customer service. You would think in an area where so many people speak so many different languages, people would be more agile in interpreting each other. It is not so. Our Home Despot worker, who was clearly trained in Customer Service in Russia, pre fall of communism, wanted nothing to do with us. He was cousins, I believe with the Sunnyvale waiter we encountered early in our sojourn here, who could not comprehend that I was trying to order the basil pizza. To me "bah-zil" is the herb. "Bay-zil" is I don't know what. To service workers in California, it is all one unpleasant mystery best to be avoided by pretending the customers are mentally slow and also invisible.

So, last week the latest garborator died. My husband returned home from the store quite promptly this time; his American improves every day.

He was horrified the garborator had died so soon after it had been installed, although it was a matter of years, and darkly blamed it in the coffee grounds. Needless to say I was skeptical, sticking to my drain facilitating story. Why do I bother, you may ask. Of course when the bad unit was removed, I received this happy report: "So it was the coffee grounds that burned out the motor. The entire bottom of the garborator was packed with them."

People with engineering degrees are so often annoyingly right about these things. But could he explain how sneaky editing had made the season premiere of House a completely different episode than the one they had been appearing to promise us all summer? No.

I do have my uses.