K-Cups and Colorado River . . .

With my buddy Nick Russell’s help, I think I’ve finally got a handle on the whole Arizona CCW thing. Looks like all I have to submit the paperwork with a photo, two fingerprint cards, a copy of my Utah CCW, and some money, and then just wait a while. Almost easy, peazy.

Yesterday morning when I was making coffee, I accidently broke a chunk out of the bottom of the carafe of our Hamilton Beach Flexbrew coffee maker.

Hamiliton Beach FlexBrew

We got this 2 or 3 years ago when we needed a new coffee maker, and since we wanted to also try the whole K-Cup thing, this one seemed a good choice. But using it for the next several months, confirmed what I had already thought.

At least as far as I’m concerned (Jan too, for that matter) it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee using a K-Cup. It’s always too bitter. I tried a bunch of different brands of coffee in the K-Cups, all with no luck. But it turns out it wasn’t just the K-Cups.

The Flexbrew has an option so that you can put your own coffee grounds in a K-Cup replacement so you can make a single cup of your own coffee. But what I found was, using the same amount of coffee and water, if I used the K-Cup side, it was bitter and not very good.

But if I ran that same amount of coffee and water through the regular brewing mechanism, it came out tasting as good as usual. So for that reason, I haven’t even used the K-Cup side in over a year.

So after I cleaned up the glass, I checked Amazon to see how much a new carafe would cost. And it was about $30. Wow!  So since we were going to Wal-Mart this afternoon, I thought I’d wait to see what they had.

And what I quickly found out is that I could buy a whole new coffee maker for a lot less than a new carafe. In fact, they had this Mr. Coffee 12 Cup Programmable, normally $28, for less than $20 on a 4th of July Rollback.

MrCoffeeMaker

And this one also had the brew strength selector that we liked on the Flexbrew. So we came home with a new coffee maker that made us great coffee this morning.

It seems like I’m always being surprised how Wal-Mart takes care of their customers. Back last Friday when we got home from a Wal-Mart run, I found that we were missing a couple of items. Since they were the last two items rung up and they weren’t really big, I figured they were just left at the bottom of a bag and didn’t make it into our cart.

We didn’t get back to WM until yesterday so I took the receipt to Customer Service to see if I could get my $9 back. When I told the guy what had happened, he turned around, grabbed a large file card box, and then flipping through it, found a copy of my receipt.

When a customer leaves any items at the checkout, the receipt for them is turned over to Customer Service to wait for them to come back. When I asked, he did say that even without the receipt, they would refund the money, unless it was a big screen TV or something. Nice service.

Later in the morning, I spent time on the phone making reservations for our next couple of weeks after we leave here this coming Monday. Our first night will be in Sun Valley, AZ, then 2 nights in Albuquerque and 2 nights in Amarillo, and then 4 nights in Pauls Valley, OK.

After that  we don’t have a hard date until August 14th at the Colorado River TT for Landon’s birthday, so the in-between time is still up in the air.

Wrapping up for today, my great-niece Stahlie has put up a new website for kids who don’t really like history. Called Adventurous History, it looks like she’s off to a great start with a very nice looking site.

Besides being a real history buff, she’s also a great artist.

Stahlie - More Art

Stahlie's Art

Keep checking back to her site as she adds new material.

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Thought for the Day:

“I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” — Marilyn Monroe

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