Beware of filtered water…

As recommended by other users, I use Brita filtered water in my Gaggia Classic espresso machine. Brita sternly warns against using such water for longer than one day. This might be fine when keeping a family supplied with coffee, not so much when it’s just for one. It’s wasteful in terms of water, and also in terms of filter use, as it reaches its throw-way date long before it’s processed the optimum amount of water.

I get through, at most, 3 200ml mugs of café crema a day (think of an Americano, but 100% coffee, no hot water), and often just one cup.

Some Gaggia Classic espresso machine tips for Spoonies…

This is an addendum to my previous post and is aimed, for the most part, at Spoonies. (If you’re not a Spoonie,** and/or want to know more, please click through.)

**In a nutshell, a Spoonie is a disabled person whose illness is not immediately apparent to a casual observer – think MS, Crohn’s, or ME, or my heart/lung/Addison’s problems.

**

Noise abatement.

First, some background. I live in a sheltered flat (I’m disabled, and a Spoonie, for the newbies among you). The place was purpose-built but you could be forgiven for thinking it was a conversion as the build quality is crap.

Each flat is a brick box, but all the internal walls are hollow stud and plasterboard abominations. In the kitchen, the worktops are mounted on these hollow walls, turning it into a huge, reverberating, drum.

Reclaiming my life…

Well, sort of, anyway.

Since I went down with what was eventually diagnosed as ME, but might equally be the long-term effects of being struck by lightning or even the earliest stages of Addison’s Disease, I lost a chunk of every day to enforced “rest” – by which I mean I was pretty much unconscious for much of the afternoon, and often the evening, every day.

I eventually figured out that by not eating lunch this didn’t happen in the afternoon, and so I got back to some semblance of normality. However, this year the problem has not only returned, it’s expanded into every evening, the end result being – aside from losing a large part of my day – that I couldn’t sleep at night (I’ll gloss over the perversity of the severe pain that kept me awake at night failing to do so during the day/evening!).

So I thought – COFFEE! That keeps people awake…

Gaggia Carezza Espresso Machine – First Impressions…

As so often, when I’m ill and in a lot of pain (and depressed, too), I get an urge to treat myself, in the hope that it will make me feel better. The fact that it almost never does so rarely deters me.

Having discovered, recently, that coffee keeps me awake during the day, thus enabling me to sleep at night, has prompted me to invest in a new espresso machine and a grinder for the beans.

You might recall I bought cheap espresso machine a couple of weeks ago. It’s OK, but I just fancied something better and for which after-market goodies are available. Humour me – my life is shit, I have to take my pleasure where I can find it!

Oh look, my coffee machine has died…

A cooker in extremis – the hotplates sprouting random hotspots like a teenager sprouts zits – prompted the last post, re the switch to an induction hob. And then more buggeration set in.

While rearranging the kitchen to accommodate the hob, I found a puddle of coffee under my Dolce Gusto machine (a shame, as this machine got me back into coffee-drinking which, I discovered in my clapped-out state, is a good way to start the day).

I moved it, cleaned up the mess while wondering how the hell it got there as the design of these machines makes it impossible to leak coffee beneath its main body, moved it back – and, hey, there was another puddle, this time of plain water. As water and electricity aren’t a fun mix, I took the hint and pensioned it off. Bloody annoying as I only recently restocked with my favourite coffee pods so, when I feel up to it, I’ll disembowel it and see if I can find the leak – not easy as it’ll have dried out by then and might be impossible to find, and it looks like it needs specialist tools to take it apart. We’ll see.

Problems with My Espresso Ltd – Update…

Got my money back – the refund appeared in my account this morning – and they went right down to the wire with it.

However, if you have similar problems, be aware that I’ve been told by Consumer Direct (the organisation that’s been inserted as a buffer between the public and Trading Standards) – and hey, you’ll just love this – you can