Paging Juan Valdez...

I NEED COFFEE!

I can't GET any coffee because a bunch of guys are holding an impromptu meeting in the pantry and no one can get to the DAMN COFFEE MAKER!

They've been there for 20 effing minutes. Oblivious to the two dozen people who have come in, hovered, tried to get through their love knot and given up. And come back to the same problem.

What the hell is it with MEN?

Is there a reason men won't do anything until it's overdue? Is there a reason men won't do anything without a reason? I mean, a reason as in "if you leave that newspaper in the middle of the floor the ink will rub off on the carpet and the cat will pee on it." I don't know ONE guy who will just pick the damn paper up because it needs to be picked up. They all need solid, scientific proof as to exactly WHY the paper needs to be picked up and, having been given said proof, they set up a time line. As in "well, the cat's outside, I'll pick it up when he's ready to come in unless he comes in and goes to sleep, in which case the paper doesn't need to be picked up for awhile." And then they argue with you as to just why it isn't really necessary to pick the paper up at all, it's not doing any harm on the floor. "Because it's a mess, that's why" doesn't compute.

I, like most people who own furniture, have what's still known as a "coffee table" in front of the broken down sofa. It's my homage to better times, when the frame didn't stick out of the couch and the upholstery was on one piece because the damn cat refuses to stop using the furniture as his personal scratching post.

Have I mentioned I'm not a cat person? Although I always seem to be stuck with one. This, however, is the first time I've had one that destroyed the furniture. He's SEVEN FREAKING YEARS OLD and, while I don't approve of it, I'll rip his claws out myself because I'm just NOT in a mental place stable enough to wait for the cat to die in 10 years so I can FINALLY have a decent place to live. It's probably "Better Homes and Garden's" fault but still...

Anyway, back to the coffee table. Every time I open the Internet, turn on the television or go into someone else's house I see a coffee table. All kinds of various coffee tables. Glass, wood, marble, tile topped, you name it.

Now, here's the operative word: SEE. I SEE the table. Sometimes it's unadorned, sometimes the morning paper and a magazine or two are on it, almost always there's something ornamental. Something pleasing to the eye, something nice to look at. A plant, maybe some flowers, some sort of ceramic tschotsky.

I haven't seen my table since Easter Sunday when we had our measly family to dinner. I mean measly in a numerical way, btw, we only have two people who condescend to visit us. The rest of the time I have four nicely curved maple legs which support 10 pounds of empty envelopes, 47 various business cards, half a dozen unwatched DVDs, two weeks worth of junk mail and the hubster's laptop, permanently in the open position.

The hubster loves his laptop like life itself. He's had it a long, long time. It has a special stand with built in fans to keep it cool and comfortable. He's run it so long the battery has turned to some sort of jello goo and now said laptop is permanently lashed to a charger which is lashed to an external hard drive (which sits on the floor next to the sofa) which is all lashed by cable to the wall. This is pretty much why no one BUT the hubster ever sits on the couch...you can do serious damage to yourself if you inadvertently get tangled up on all those cords and God forbid you should pull a cord out of the laptop while your trying to keep your footing and not pitch forward out the second floor window.

He travels with the laptop and he carefully packages it and takes it to the hotel desk if we leave the room, there to check the laptop into a secure place. My son, on the other hand, usually stuffs HIS laptop into his backpack and leaves it on the nightstand when we leave the room. This horrifies the hubster, who thinks the world is lined up at our door waiting for an opportunity to steal his Mac. Oddly enough, neither laptop has even been compromised. I personally think there are a couple of reasons for this. 1) Computers, like automobiles, are outdated the instant ownership is officially transferred from dealer to purchaser. Both the hubster and my son are Mac users. My son is running a platform called either Leopard or Snow Leopard, I'm not sure which. The hubster, early on the bandwagon, is, I believe, running Saber tooth Tiger. No one is especially interested in any of these outdated operating systems. 2) Everyone and his brother HAS a laptop. If you hold your nose and use Windows you can go to Walmart on Black Friday and get a laptop for 69 bucks. Like cell phones, they're just not that exotic.

One would think that, with this laptop in existence for lo, these many years, he might use it to, oh, I dunno...maybe keep himself ORGANIZED? Instead of writing things down on empty envelopes and the back of receipts from Trader Joe's and then pitching them onto the burgeoning volcano of irrelevant papers on the coffee table and promptly forgetting he ever talked to anyone, maybe, just maybe, there's some sort of calendar gizmo in the computer? Okay, I KNOW Macs usually don't run Outlook, which is a Windows operation that causes little bells go off now and then and say things like "Pay the phone bill by 5pm today!" but there MUST be something in there.

Something where one could type in "Pay the phone bill by 5pm today or you will have no Internet in the morning and your wife will go to work and blog about how damn disorganized you are."

Not that that's news mind you, he's been this disorganized for the 30+ years we've been together. He was an hour late to our wedding rehearsal dinner because he didn't remember to look the place up on a map and he forgot that we were coming separately and therefore I wouldn't be driving, and he didn't "kiss the bride" at our wedding because he was thinking about something else and wasn't exactly sure that's what the priest meant by that phrase. I'm used to it. I didn't say I LIKE it, but I'm used to it.

So why am I going on about this now?

Because I STILL can't get to the damn coffee, that's why!