Cleo Update

The new cat seems to be feeling a lot better. She is starting to act like a cat now. You know, running away from people when it is pill time, just looking at you like you are some kind of asshole when you call her, getting right in your face to meow loudly when she wants you to get up and feed her, and so on.

So that is good. Some people would say that the running away and looking at you like you are an asshole thing is bad. But lets face some facts here. Cleo is a cat, and cats are just like that. when they want to hang out with you, they do. When they want to do something else, they run off.

In other news, I went to a high end mall to scarf some food at the TGI Fridays. While there I decided to go crash a few stores and see what good stuff they had.

Now I have an el-cheapo stove top espresso maker thing. You have to unscrew the base, fill it with water, fill this funnel like thing with ground espresso, stick the funnel thing back into the base, screw the contraption together, then place the whole thing on the stove. The water in the base boils and is forced up the stem of the funnel to the coffee. From there it continues to be forced up another stem and into the upper portion of the thing. When the thing stops steaming the coffee is done.

It makes decent espresso - but it lacks foam. When you get the stuff at the local Cuban place, the coffee has foam. So I want foam at home too!!!

Anyway, at one store they had some espresso makers. So I find one that looked cool. All stainless steel and crap. It has a high pressure pump thing and a frothing attachment for making cafe con leche and everything.

$2400. For a COFFEE MACHINE!!! Are they totally insane? All it does is make coffee! I can get coffee at any Cuban place for around a buck. So if you buy a $2400 coffee machine, plus 7% sales tax that is $2,675 - that works out to 7.32 YEARS of buying a coffee every day at any Cuban place. And that assumes that you can get the coffee beans / grounds for free!

Finding a Cuban place in Miami is about as challenging as finding sand in the Sahara Desert. Or finding water in the Great Lakes.

Are people really that crazy? It seems so. So I found another machine that is only $300. It is still a lot for something that only makes coffee - but lets face it. Espresso machines are not cheap. They make cheap ones, but I am afraid they will not last. Automatic drip "gringo" coffee is a LOT more simple to make. For that a cheap machine will work fine. But espresso is made under pressure. Cheap pressure pumps break. So yea, avoid the $60 machine.

But I think that spending $2500 on a coffee machine is obscene.

However there are things that it is OK to spend 2 1/2 large on. The next laptop computer I am going to get will be a MacBook Pro. With the 2.33 Ghz dual core processor, 2 gigs of memory, 120 gig hard drive, and some sort of fancy graphics card with 256 megs video memory. It will cost me about as much as a fancy high end coffee machine would cost.

Or maybe Ill just go back to the stone age and get a desktop Mac. It will be cheaper, but not nearly as portable.