Stop the Madness!

In what I hope is the last in a series of posts, I have to once again tell you about some morning, Diet Coke-related woes.

Yesterday, I decided that I needed to take the trash out. My apartment is right next to the foyer of my building. The trash chute room is in the foyer, meaning that it is approximately 27 steps from my kitchen. However, being the modern day, green-conscious type of guy that I am, I decided to dump the bag of trash on my way down to the car as I headed to work. I'm all about conserving energy. That task's degree of difficulty was heightened by the fact that I was also toting my laptop bag, my lunch, and two cans of diet coke for the long ride to the office.

The trash chute itself didn't make the job any easier. I don't know if I would go so far as to say that the trash chute in my building is hard to open, but it's really not a one-handed job. There's some stiff resistance that helps the chute close when it's not being held open. It's somewhat annoying if you're putting trash in, but the rest of the time it hinders trashy smells from wafting up and out into the building. Plus, there's a latch that has to be held to the side to open the chute. Again, it's all about keeping the chute closed unless someone is actively dumping trash. Given these obstacles, a smart person would set down his other burdens and focus both of his hands and arms on dumping the trash. However, I have shown you time and again that I am not a smart person, and I started in doing this opening by using my right arm to cradle the laptop, lunch, and two diet coke cans. The hand attached to that arm was supposed to hold the latch over while the left arm and hand held the trash bag, pulled open the chute, then performed a nifty up, around, and over maneuver (complete with swooshing sound effects, of course) to deftly toss the trash bag into the chute.

Unfortunately, the chute didn't cooperate at first. So I leaned a little bit to get a little more purchase on things and was gratified to see the chute come open. As I shifted to start the nifty garbage bag disposal maneuver, the only sound effect that came out was "NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooo..." as one of my cans of soda went tumbling and clanking down the chute. After that, getting the trash into the chute was no problem. However, I had to go back to the apartment to get another can of soda, meaning my energy conservation didn't work out at all. Sigh.

BUT, that's not the last of it. I felt safe from such travails today, in that I don't have to take out the trash, and I'm working from home. However, the fridge pack in my fridge was rudely empty. Lucky for me, I had another, full fridge pack in my trunk that was too much to carry up the last time I went to the grocery store. So I ambled down to the garage and got that thing back up here. It wasn't cold, though, so I poured it into a cup with ice and took up position to do some work from my couch, placing the soda on the coffee table (or soda table, in my case).

At some point the Pretty Boy called to say hey, and we started chatting. My Pavlovian response to a phone call in front of my computer kicked in, and I started playing Solitaire as we chatted. At some point, I leaned back and put my feet on the coffee table to be a little more comfortable. Unfortunately the place I put those feet was the exact same place the cup of soda had been just a second before, causing the creation of a small, man-made (as if there could be any other kind) lake of diet coke on the soda table, complete with two small, trickling waterfalls falling to the rug. I shouted something that probably wasn't family-oriented (unless we are talking about a West Virginian family), and hung up so I could attempt to clean up this not-so-natural disaster.
I managed to mostly clean it up, but I'm left wondering what the long-term effects will be on my rug.

One happy piece of news -- and the Pretty Boy would do well to emulate this behavior -- is that my spill in no way ruined or even touched my stellar if a bit fancy remote control. So I have that going for me.

I recognize this trend (which we officially have, with 3 data points) might indicate that diet coke and I don't go together in the morning. But I can't not drink them. Maybe what I need to do is stop doing mornings. That would put a stop to this alarming chain of events.