I Am The Coffee Party I Was Waiting For

Not too long ago, my beautiful wife commented on the number of coffee cups in a phrase that indicated I should get rid of some. She was probably being defensive because she was not properly allocating said resources between the upstairs collection and the downstairs collection when she unloaded the dishwasher. Not properly according to my unpublished schedule. You see, the coffee cups downstairs are for the little single cup brewer that I use down there; others, including the large mugs, are those allocated to the upstairs portion of coffee cups used with the upstairs, pedestrian 12-cup coffee maker.

TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story.

You see, I prefer to drink from the large mugs, but I have only two. I use the downstairs coffee maker in the mornings when I’m going to have a cup when I start my work day before my children arise. Then, when they’re up, I switch to the big coffee maker and to the big mugs (12 cups, the side of the carafe says. Or 4 mugs).

And yet.

We do run the dishwasher once a day or almost; given this, do I really need thirty coffee cups?

The partially depleted reservoirs look like this:

I mean, what am I planning? A coffee party?

As you know, gentle reader, I am an artifact-based life form. Most of these coffee cups have some significance to me. I have some that are Fiestaware, which go with our Fiestaware dishes in case we ever have people over for a party and we have coffee. However, we’ve upgraded our company dishes to some white porcelain stuff that does not have matching coffee cups. I have coffee cups that were my mothers, including one from one of her old commands, one with a snowman on it, and whatnot. I have a couple of Gevalia coffee cups that were free gifts for subscribing a subscription or two back (when I cut expenditures, I cut my Gevalia shipments). I have a couple that were Christmas gifts (a set of Monopoly cups from Aunt Sandy which are, honestly, outside the two-year window to retain them before putting them in the garage sale). I have a Green Bay Packers cup which is, of course, sacred. I have a couple from my Aunt Dale bearing the logo of her former employer and its brands. A couple of St. Louis Blues cups we got when we were frequent visitors to the Savvis Center. And so on.

So they all mean something, sort of. Although I could probably lose the Gevalia cups and the Monopoly cups, which is four.

And yet.

This week, my wife traveled for her job for four days, which left me tending the boys and drinking heavily. Or so it would seem.

I had my cup in the morning. I had my mug in the morning. In the afternoon, I braced myself with another cup. And, as it was cooler and autumnal in the evenings, I had a powdered hot cider mix as a treat. That’s four cups in a day. And as Mommy was not cooking and Daddy was not grilling to impress Mommy, we had a tour o’ fast food for dinners which meant I did not run the dishwasher for days.

Suddenly, my supply of cups dwindled to dangerous levels. Well, to the point that I could have seriously run out of coffee cups if I didn’t put forth the effort to pour some soap into the dishwasher and press a button.

So I can’t get rid of those cups because sometimes Heather goes out of town for five days at a time instead of just four, and I could need over twenty cups.

HOARDING RATIONALIZATION: COMPLETE