I stopped in my local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for a drink this morning.

My local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf happens to be in a supermarket, so I sit and watch the checkers as they check, while the baggers bag and the customers cuss.

I was sipping on my mocha ice blended when the little Italian man, Guirmo, or Guillimo, or something, came into work and stopped by my table for a chat.

He couldn’t be a day under seventy or an inch over five feet tall, and his English isn’t so great, which is okay because my Italian consists of buongiorno, arrivederci and Mama Mia!  He was sporting his brown ski cap AS ALWAYS, and it was lopsided AS ALWAYS, and he grinned a lopsided grin when I said, “Buongiorno!”

After he returned the greeting, he proceeded to tell me something about the exciting day he had yesterday.

At least I THINK that’s what it was about, because I recognized the word “yesterday,” even though he said it kind of like “yisserdi” and followed it with a tightly strung together stream of mostly vowels that I struggled (in vain) to follow.

“Eeesa notta soo gud whens deyles you doo whassis dey do wissa dey!  Eeesa monees dat deysa payyo doosti da fimilee unsa listee deys”, said Guillermo, or Gonmollo, or something, with his hands waving wildly as he adamantly exclaimed all of this to me.

I nodded in total agreement as he went on.. “Eeesa dat deysa ar notta yooo butta unda leesa weeeshi doos unda yoooo butta, soo yoosa don dis, no?”

He laughed, so I laughed too.  Then he asked me a question.. I think..

“Gossa yooo den da mees?  Yoosa don evuh don dees?”

I gave him the most thoughtful, contemplative expression that I could muster while under such linguistic duress.  After a few seconds I nodded and said, “Si!”

He laughed and pointed at me.. I suspected I’d just copped to being a bedwetter or something, and I blushed accordingly.

Then he glanced at the clock and got even more excited, which I wouldn’t have thought possible, before excusing himself to go punch in and begin his shift.  “Issa go too workkay now, arrivederci! arrivederci!”

He bounced off and tossed a wave back at me, which I returned.

I sure hope he doesn’t spend the day telling all the checkers, baggers and customers my dirty little secret.. whatever it is.

In the event that you’re not sure coffeesister deserves her online name, allow me to share this anecdote with you..

The other day there was a knock at the door. As she answered, a gruff voice said, “Delivery, lady.. where d’ya want it?”

She told him that right inside the entryway would be fine. So he backed the truck up to the door and rolled out the fork lift. With it, he trumbled into our living room and deposited the biggest box of coffee I’ve ever seen.

Over the holidays we came across a new-fangled coffee maker made by Braun that was on sale for half price. It uses laser technology. It takes these space-age little coffee pods with space-age coffee in them and the laser reads the bar code on the label of the pod, which tells it how hot to heat the water and how much to deposit into your cup.

It jams the water through the pod after punching a space-age hole in it, and makes the perfect cup of coffee as a result. It also makes the perfect chai tea latte, or french roast vanilla, or cappuccino, or whatever you’d like that’s available in the line of space-age pods they offer.

I think the machine we bought was half price because the new line they just put out cleans your coffee cups when you’re done and orders more off the internet when you run low. Shoot, we can do that stuff ourselves, we’re not lazy.

After bringing the machine home, coffeesister unpacked it and found a coupon to order a box of pods online. This particular box was small because it was free, and the pods lasted us about a week.

But we liked them so much that we decided to order more, so she ordered the box that the fork lift brought in, which is jam-packed with a thousand different space-age coffee pods of every imaginable sort, which will take us at least a month or more to go through. Less if I start blogging more often.

So now we order coffee from the internet. The supermarket next door doesn’t carry the spage-age pods anyway, so we have to. I just let coffeesister do it, since she’s the one with the appropriate username.

I don’t think they send extra pods because of it, but they should.