THREE-DAY ICED COFFEE

Tomorrow my life will slow down for a moment.

Maybe.

I write "maybe" because I never know what spontaneous fun is going to come my way, but lately I have been too busy to drink an iced coffee.  A small iced coffee, no less.

This is how it goes:

Wednesday the school year finally ends.  I am puttering about my classroom, trying to tie up all loose ends and lock up anything and everything that might mean something, all the while clearing out the last of this year's useless files.  A party is happening down the hall honoring retirees and people changing schools, and I have to go not so much because I haven't said goodbye to people (I have) but because there is cake.

Then, I have to fight northbound traffic to get to a hair cutting appointment.  There actually isn't as much traffic as there usually is, perhaps because it's a Wednesday and not a Friday, so I stop at the book store.  In my center console I sometimes keep random coupons, and in the bag of such coupons I discover a gift card that I haven't used yet.  Score!  I buy myself four books to go with the two hundred I have at home that need to be read.

I drive through the moguls of street expansion and still manage to arrive twenty minutes ahead of schedule, so I hop over to Dunks for a small iced coffee (caramel swirl).  While sipping my coffee, I check my email, then head across the street to get my hair trimmed and some hair cut off the front into bangs so I no longer resemble Cousin Itt.  When my hair is done, I still have most of the iced coffee.

At home I decide that a glass of cava is in order to celebrate surviving the school year, so I pop the iced coffee into the fridge, where it remains until the next morning.  On Thursday morning, I grab a few swigs before leaving to an all-day friend adventure, then I put the still-half-full Dunks iced coffee back into the fridge.

When I arrive home, I am ten seconds into my house when a deluge starts.  It is raining so fast and so furiously that if I'd hesitated one final moment at my car in the driveway, I'd be a drowned rat by now.  I hate thunder and lightning, so, just in case as the radar shows a huge red-orange blob heading my way, I hook the earbuds into my handy-dandy MP3 player, which has been malfunctioning and now only has about twenty-five boring songs accessible.  Weirdly, or perhaps fortuitously, the MP3 player gets stuck and will not pause, advance, repeat, or even shut down.

Friday morning I decide that I should probably replace the MP3 player.  I grab a quick breakfast of cereal, sip more of my iced coffee (yes, it still tastes fine), and stick the Dunks cup back into the fridge.  Later on after successfully buying a new MP3 player, I decide the oncoming humid air means I cannot wait any longer to put in the air conditioners, so, before adding tons of music to the new MP3 player, I clean all four air conditioner filters, then I install all four air conditioners in the windows.

This calls for ... I open the fridge ... it's only 12:30 ... slightly after noontime ... and I see ...  Dunks!  Hey, I can finally finish my iced coffee from Wednesday!  I do so over the course of several hours that I transfer all of my random music from computer files and actual CDs onto thumb drives (so I never have to do this again) and then onto the new MP3 player.  The iced coffee helps me make it through until after 1:00 a.m. when all the files are completely finished and transferred.

Not only is this the world's longest time to finish one small iced coffee, but, as a testament to Dunkin Donuts, the damn thing tastes just as fine as it did when I bought it fresh Wednesday.  Three-Day iced coffee.  Maybe it's a new thing.  Maybe it's not, and some of you already knew about the iced coffee longevity, but I am still a relatively recent coffee drinker, so I find this totally fascinating.

Now it's the weekend, though.  Do I tough it out with just tea, or do I start this crazy Dunkins adventure all over again?  It seems like it's a good way to pace myself this summer, but I'm a little nervous about it all.  The whole reason the iced coffee lasted so long is because I was too busy to drink it.  Maybe I'm cursing myself to a summer of ultra-activity.

Hmmmm.  I'll think about it and let you know how it goes.