Our Mr. Coffee died. We’re sitting shiva through Wednesday.

By now I’m sure you’ve noticed that I didn’t write any Howdygram posts over the weekend. I have no excuse, really, other than I wasn’t especially motivated and spent all of my time instead sleeping, eating things and taking care of Sam. This partially explains why I’m awake at 5 in the morning. Too damn much sleep.

Before I get wrapped up in other topics I thought I’d include the following photo of the excellent crap I purchased on Saturday. Included here are: 1) a shiny new Cuisinart coffeemaker with a 12-cup thermal carafe; 2) two kinds of extremely low-carb breakfast cereal; 3) EZ-Sweetz liquid sucralose (Splenda); and 4) several quarts of unsweetened almond milk. Items 2, 3 and 4 are from Netrition.com. We ordered item 1 from Amazon.com because our Mr. Coffee died. (We’re sitting shiva through Wednesday.)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried Blue Diamond’s unsweetened almond milk. Isn’t this stuff amazing? Almond milk has less than half the calories of cow’s milk, ZERO LACTOSE (very important) and practically no carbohydrates whatsoever. I can finally drink milk again! I’ve been ordering from Netrition but I might send Sam to Wal-Mart today to find out if they carry it at our neighborhood market.

Did any of you bother with the Academy Awards last night? The only reason I watched was to see Barbra Streisand. The rest of the show was thoroughly meaningless unless you’re into a bunch of grossly overpaid narcissists congratulating each other on national TV.

My projects for today will include laundry, defrosting a brick of ground beef, replacing the Febreze electric scented oil refill thingies in four rooms and another battle with the Einsteins in AT&T’s billing department. This time I intend to strong-arm them into giving us their $129 U-Verse, Internet and digital home phone promotional package because they’re currently charging us $207 every month for the exact same services. I think I waste half my life on their stupid website trying to figure out all the ways they’re secretly overcharging us. For instance, why are we paying $46.75 for Internet service when they advertise it for $29.95? And why the hell do they keep charging my cell phone for incoming text messages when the only incoming texts I’ve ever received are spam from AT&T? I hate these people. I mean it.

I’m going back to bed now. Don’t be jealous, okay?