In Search of a Drip Coffee Maker

And parking meter woes.

"The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question."— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

It’s Saturday! That means errand day. We made a list of what couldn’t be found on the weekly shopping trip to Kingston, along with a few extras - a drip coffee maker, a cask of wine, some coconut yoghurt, passionflower Kombucha ( my latest addiction) and European wurst.

Alfred and Nyx are almost back to normal. The boy is acting like Captain Jack, brashly fearless. Note the treasure chest.

While the girl has cannily found the best hiding places, just in case we try to shove her in the travel crate again. Smart Nyx. She’s a suspicious survivor, gotta love it.

(Thank you for your patience. I will try to refrain from more cat pictures. Promise.)

We left the cats - they appear to have weathered the worst of it and don’t need to have us in sight every minute - and drove into Hobart with ‘The LIST.’

You should hear ominous music in the background when you read ‘The LIST’ because my husband and I have very different views of shopping. VERY different.

I had trouble today. Maybe because this morning I called a good friend - my former neighbor, shopping companion, problem solver and black-sense-of-humor friend. The best kind. I’d missed her a LITTLE, but that grew to a lot as we talked.

Talking over Whatsapp at 5:30 am my time, 3:30 pm her time is not the same as walking two miles together at 8 am solving the world’s problems while breathing in the humid Georgia air. The talking is a lot more real when you’re sweating and panting for breath. (She’s a fast walker, I had to trot sometimes to make up ground.)

When I went through the deepest part of my anxiety and depression after retiring early two years ago, she was the friend who wouldn’t let me stay inside and fester. I’m sure I was an unpleasant companion, but she forced me into her SUV nevertheless and drove me to TJ Maxx to shop for bargains and then the reward of a cappucino at our local coffee house. She’d even snare me for an estate sale run to get me outside and focused on something other than doom scrolling.

No T J Maxx bargain hunting with a woman friend today. Today, it was a list with Herr Zen. First, the drip coffee maker.

We only have a coffee press in our Air BnB and both of us are a bit grossed out by the sediment in the bottom of our mugs. It’s also small. So we’d (correction, make that HE’D) located a Breville drip coffee maker at a store called House. Good reviews, on sale, just what we wanted.

We put the address in the GPS, drove to Hobart, parked the car (more on that later) and walked to the shop. The salesgirl had no idea what we were talking about, they USED to have one, but it was long gone. All they had on the floor were those fancy schmancy little frou-frou coffee machines that make lots of noise while brewing a tiny cup of coffee, then more noise when you have to froth the milk. We’re purists. Pour us some black coffee out of a pot and into a big mug ( no tiny espresso cups please) let us add some milk out of the carton, we’re done.

We walked a few more blocks to try to find one at another store. This store was much nicer, lots of fancy dishes, carved ceramic bowls in many colors, meat thermometers, perfect for a foodie like me. But we had a LIST, people! No drip coffee makers here, either. Fortunately, they did have a cheap bundle of measuring spoons, the one thing missing from our little kitchen in the fairy tale cottage. It wasn’t on The LIST, but we made an exception.

As we walked back to the car, we passed two beautiful furniture stores. I’d given our old red leather couch to a local charity when we packed out in January and we’d agreed to buy another sofa in Tasmania for our new house. I lingered at the door and Herr Zen said “Are we going in to look for a sofa for our nonexistent house?” Umm, no, I guess we’re not. That would be stupid. (But fun!)

So I followed him up the hill to our car, which had a $50 dollar parking ticket poking out from under the windshield wiper. Oh no. This is not good. We’d tried to work the streetside meter, followed all the directions, paid our money but the damn thing never spit out a receipt to stick in our windshield.

When the ticket didn’t print, I figured the meter people must be using some new technology. We paid, put in our number (1666, maybe that was the first clue) and maybe someone somewhere in a huge computer room kept track? Ummm, no. That would be stupid. (But fun!)

I still have no idea what we did wrong. Live and learn. What do you think? It seems pretty easy - but we still managed to mess it up. Or else they ran out of printing paper, who knows?

After a few choice words, we drove to Harvey Norman’s, another appliance store that sells coffee makers. They had two on their inventory in the warehouse, but couldn’t locate either one. The universe really wants us to buy an expensive Italian coffee machine. Unfortunately, we already have an expensive Swedish coffee machine in our household goods, currently sitting in the port. No way we’re going to buy a second one - we just want a simple drip coffee maker, Universe!!

We drove to a Harvey Norman outlet store. Nope, no drip coffee maker.

At this point, I lost it. I don’t know where to shop, where to park, how to pay for a parking stub, how to find a drip coffee maker, and I don’t want to keep running around in circles.

I know where EVERYTHING is at home, I can drive and get back in no time flat, with time leftover to do some REAL shopping, the impulse buying kind, with my best friend. Who is not here.

Herr Zen got it pretty quickly. Major bonus points for that. He pointed out that I was facing some serious cultural changes and I’d hit a wall. (No DUH!) Everything will be fine. It takes time to learn your way around. It takes time to get used to driving on the other side of the road. It takes time to find the shops that sell what you love.

I tearfully pointed out that it’s also NO FUN to shop with him. He rolled his eyes. He’s a guy - shopping means leaving your house to buy the one thing you need and coming back as quickly as possible. It’s not an art form to him. He doesn’t want to stroll through the kitchen store and pick up and admire random cute coffee cups and wine glasses. ‘We don’t NEED coffee cups and wine glasses. Do we?!?”

I remember when we bought that red leather sofa that I donated a few months ago. We made a deal. I would go to every store and look at all of the sofas, narrow it down to TWO - three at the outside - and then he would go in and select from the last two choices. It works! But it’s not as much fun. I want a friend to go in every store with me and laugh while we bouncily try out each one to find the perfect couch.

My poor husband. I’m driving him crazy, but he’s being really sweet about all of the angst I unload on him every three or four days. There are more good times than bad, but I can WORK a bad day when it hits. And make it twice as bad. It’s a gift, I tell you.

I need to make a friend really quickly - one who likes to shop and drink coffee and laugh over red wine, maybe even take long, fast walks for exercise. Unfortunately we are still in limbo - no house, no car. But that will change soon.

And I also need to start driving. Then I can shop on my own and wander around to my heart’s content without driving Herr Zen into the loony bin.

ANYWAY. Everything ended up okay. Better than okay. We went to a store called Ziggy’s in Moonah, a suburb of Hobart. I’d found it online while we were still stateside. Ziggy’s makes sausages, European style. Smoked, with paprika, spices and cheese. Homemade smoked meat sausages are the best. Behold the meat counter. (And this is the REGULAR one. I didn’t want to embarrass Herr Zen by snapping the other one while he talked to the butcher. Men need privacy, people.)

They also sell diced wallaby and wallaby fillets. I will have to try it - but now that I’ve seen how cute they are hopping through the forest, not sure I can add them in as a permanent protein source. The Tasmanian venison in the upper corner might be more my speed.

The little European style butcher shop didn’t just have meat. They also had German cookies and other European sweets

Passionfruit Melting Moments and Marzipan. The candy marzipan and the real deal - the paste my German neighbors added to the middle of their cakes.

Oy. And I gave up sugar yesterday, like an idiot.

And then the row of canned fish. No gefilte fish, but pretty much everything else I could ever want. (No idea why I mentioned gefilte fish, I hate that stuff, but I had an intern who lived on it one summer in Germany. It’s hard to live in a pork loving country when you can’t eat pork, for sure.)

And something I’ve never seen before - a whole pickled cabbage! Clever. But not today. I will have to work up my culinary courage to eat whole sauerkraut in a ball.

So. I have a place to go when I want my European fix. I have found a specialty market, My list of places to love has officially started, with Ziggy’s at the #1 spot with a bullet.

We continued our Saturday jaunt at Coles, a grocery store we haven’t tried before. Then we jumped over to the liquor store - as you do - where I bought a cask of wine, or what we’d call box wine in the U.S. Did you know an Australian invented this money saver? Me neither. Just found out. Thank you, Aussie Tom Angove!

CASK WINE (a plastic bag in a cardboard box) is an Australian invention from the 1960s. This in turn inspired Australians to great verbal invention.

Aussie slang very quickly came up with a string of names for cask wine starting with “Chateau Cardboard” and going on to call it a “handbag” or a “briefcase” often tied to a local place name. This gave us the Balga (Perth) or Belambi (Wollongong) or Boradmeadow (Newcastle) or Dubbo (central NSW) handbag.

Less inventive were names such as “boxie” or “box monster”. And rather grimmer was the nickname “bag of death”. Then it became a “goon” or “goon bag” or “goon sack” or just a “goonie”. One type of moselle was nicknamed “lady in the boat” because of the picture on the box. And then there’s my favourite: “vino collapso” (Aussie verbal invention at its best!)

I sort of like Chateau Cardboard. Fun!

Then, as we were getting ready to leave, I saw a bulk herb and spice company. I left my long suffering husband sitting in the car eating his sausages while I walked up the hill and crossed the street. Alone. Successfully. I managed to look right first, then look left when I hit the median in the center. I survived. I have skills, people!

The place is nirvana. Be still, my witchy heart. I bought a little bag of organic pumpkin seeds, some linseeds, a container of Goji berries, then a few scoops of Ashwagandha powder and a mushroom blend with chaga and lion’s mane. I even bought tiny little jars for storage purposes. Now the fairy tale cottage feels like home. I have my herbs again. And I have Shop #2 on my new list.

The positives outweighed the negatives today. For me, at least. Herr Zen is stuck paying the parking ticket. And making his morning coffee in the primitive coffee press.

Now we’re home. The man is watching rugby, drinking beer and eating wurst, while I am enjoying a glass of wine from the goon sack and birdwatching from my desk on the second floor. Parrots! I think? I need a bird book. Time to use the new library card.