celebrating the day

 Today, according to my west coast brother, is "National Senior Citizens Day."  My wonder spouse and I are definitely qualified to celebrate today and we have done so in true senior style.

First, this morning, I put fresh ground beans in our coffee maker, made sure there was water in it, and turned it on, as one of us does every morning. I probably should preface this by saying that this coffee maker, brought over from my apartment when we merged households, is at least 15 years old.  When I flipped the switch the green light came on as usual, but after a little while I realized that nothing else was happening.  No happy gurgling noises, no drip, drip, drip into the carafe, just stubborn silence.  

I presented the problem to my spouse when he came into the kitchen.  After checking the plug and flipping the switch a couple of times, he agreed with me that it was dead.  

But, since we both really like our morning coffee, he dug deep into the shelves of the pantry and unearthed his old coffee maker, very similar in style to mine.  After running some clear water through it to make sure it was working, he proceeded to make a good pot of coffee.  Of course, being an EE and loving a challenge, he decided, after breakfast, to see if he could fix my old coffee maker.  

Alas he was defeated in this attempt by one screw hole in the base of the appliance that did not have a typical screw in it.  None of his screwdrivers (and he has many) would work.  He then decided, wisely I think, that it made no sense to shop on line or in person for this very unique screwdriver, on the chance he might be able to fix the coffee maker.  So we just threw Mr. Coffee away.  Our children should be proud of us.  We didn't just put it on a shelf in the basement (would we ever do that?) we actually threw it away.

But that wasn't the end of our celebration of Senior Citizens Day.  In the afternoon we met with an agent at AAA to finalize plans for travel insurance for our May 2026 trip to Tokyo.  Now that's the way to celebrate being a Senior Citizen. Happily, they have very good coffee on Viking ships.