The conference is, so far, blowing me away with the awesome group of people participating and the need we seem to have tapped. Perfect talk after perfect talk, and all of them completely different. (I don’t know whether other people needed my talk, but I did, so it was perfect for me, anyhow.) Life is good.
Also, I’m past peak intensity with the conference project now, and my mind is moving to Monday, when Marie Kondo arrives at my house. In preparation, a thing happened to me that caused a moment of aching clarity.
The thing that happened is that SuperHusband ran out of coffee, and we needed my daughter to pick up a resupply while she was running errands in the same direction.
Because we forget to use grocery lists (I know! How hard is that? Hard for us. I’m sorry.), our method for remembering we need infrequently-purchased staple items is to save the package as a reminder. Thus the other day I set in the garage-library this bag:
What with my daughter being the one sent out, I naturally retrieved the bag to hand off to her, to make sure she knows exactly what coffee to buy.
She did not need the bag. For one thing, her father texted her the info. For another, she usually ends up being the one to buy the coffee, so she already knows.
“You sure you don’t need the bag?”
“I don’t need the bag.”
I relented. Maybe it is possible to buy the correct coffee without physically bringing in the bag and double-checking the label very, very carefully. Some people have superpowers that way. Fair enough.
And thus I was left holding the bag.
I looked down at this bag. It is in excellent condition. It is a very convenient size for . . . something. Such a quality bag, eminently reusable. If you had rice you wanted to scent vaguely of coffee? Perfect for that.
Maybe yarn, if I ever attempted knitting again, and this time I wanted the baby booties to taste and smell just like home. Perfect.
So, so, many undreamt possibilities for how to use this bag.
It felt wrong to toss the bag. Irresponsible. Wasteful.
But, alas, I can’t keep all the bags, and I already have bags (though not one quite like this), and there is no public whatsoever who would like my old coffee bag. (Would you like my old coffee bag? I could set it out for you to pick up sometime.)
Which is why, come Monday, begins the firestorm of sparking joy.
Not, with a brain like mine, something that can be done in tiny spurts. Whole brain and will and spirit will need to show up and give it their all, because the world is brimming over with coffee bags, and not buying coffee is the wrong answer.
So that’s my situation.
Will post notes from my conference talk, about that different problem I have, when I get them cleaned up at some indeterminate date in the future.
Meanwhile, here is Simcha Fisher with a must-read post for those of us who have coffee-bag problems. Even if she isn’t usually your cuppa ‘spresso, this one is Simcha at the very top of her game and saying the thing that people who own extraneous stuff need to here.