DRIBBLE CUPS

      Some of my coffee cups have holes in them that cause them to leak, kind of like the old joke dribble glasses. I discovered this when the J and I keys on my keyboard started to stick. I drink a lot of coffee in the mornings when I’m working on the computer, and careful examination of the keyboard showed that coffee drips had gotten down between the keys and that is why they were sticking. I examined all the cups and couldn’t find any holes so I figure they must be microscopic holes–big enough to leak but not big enough to see with the unaided eye. I suspect my wife bought them as a joke. (She had another explanation for the drips, but it’s so silly and farfetched I won’t embarrass her by mentioning it.)

      I decided I needed to clean the keyboard, because it’s surprising how many words have a J or an I in them—although briefly I considered taking the pseudonym of Oel Urrens from Owa instead of going through the work of cleaning the keyboard. It needed a thorough strip-down cleaning because there was coffee everywhere—some of the holes in those cups had to be huge. I started by popping all the keys off the keyboard and found that some of the plates I use when I eat at the computer also have tiny holes in them. There were enough crumbs underneath the keys to feed a family of four for a week, and I found the family of four living under my computer desk. Just joking.

      I’ve always torn things apart and cleaned and fixed them by myself. When I was young I fished a lot. Once, my father picked up an old metal bucket with three metal rods with level-wind reels in it at a household auction. They all worked when I got them, but after being left out in the rain a couple times and being dropped in the creek a time or two, two of them froze up and wouldn’t turn at all. I took the two apart, oiled them and put them back together. A level-wind reel has a lot of parts inside. What I found out was not only do all the parts have to go back inside the reel for it to work, but they have to be in the exact same place they were when the reel came apart. If I remember right the reel I didn’t clean lasted three years before I got a Zebco spincast rod and reel.

      So I got the keyboard cleaned and put back together. Everything works good and I don’t use the minus sign that much anyway.

      Just to let everyone know, when I had my 99 cent sale on my novel, County Ops: The Vengeance of Gable Fitzgerald, it got as high as number forty in the Women’s Action/Adventure category on Amazon’s bestseller list.