No more Ice Java; dead computers

One of these days I'll go to the grocery store to find they've stopped carrying yet another favorite and thoroughly taken for granted item, and on that day, I mean it, I WILL JUST SNAP.

I'm drawing a blank right now but trust me, there have been tens of products over my lifetime that I bought regularly that can't be found anywhere anymore.

The most recent casualty in this list is my Ice Java. This is a Nestle product that was discontinued in the States in 2008. It's still made and sold in Canada, and don't imagine the thought of trying to find myself a Canuck penpal just to hook me up hasn't crossed my mind.

It's a coffee syrup you mix with milk for a delicious chocolate-flavored caffeinated beverage, and it got me through many a long, sleep-deprived RGIS January. It's not as caffeinated as true coffee, but enough to give me a caffeine headache on the days I skip it. And since it's zero grams of fat, I was planning to drizzle it on everything I eat (just kidding).

I've been ordering it online in semi-massive quantities, delivered to my door like I lived on a grocery loading dock. It was working quite swimmingly until I went to place my order this week, only to be greeted by the message "discontinued/out of stock." WHAT????

Frantic Googling ensued, all of which turned up only the desperate pleas of other addicts engaged in a similar search, some a few years old. Nestle's official company line was that sales were too low to justify the shelf space, which seemed hard to believe in light of the public outcry I was seeing, but I won't pretend to understand all the intricacies of the dog (food)-eat-dog (food) world of product marketing.

There were bottles being sold on eBay to be sure, but for around $10 a pop and my least favorite cappucino flavor. I'd rather drink a can of Coke every morning.

So my next Google search was for someone who might have duplicated the recipe at home. This gave me some hits on a recipe site, which seemed simple enough. I had found what I was looking for -- if it was actually a success remained to be seen. /suspense

At this point I suppose I should make it clear that I don't cook. Or bake. If pressed with simple enough instructions I suppose I can make do, but all the cooking in our house was done by my Navy father, who didn't invite assistance. Tery, ever the smarmy one, told me to pretend I was in Potions class with Professor Snape. So I set up my Snape cardboard standee in our narrow galley kitchen and started collecting my ingredients.

I had actually two recipes, slight variations of each other, which made me uneasy -- as a noncooker, I like to be told "go to the store and buy exactly this thing." I'm not comfortable with improvisation.

So one recipe called for Dutch baking cocoa. Another specified Ghirardelli's unsweetened: which is how I discovered my grocery store no longer carries Ghirardelli's cocoa powder. Remember back at the beginning when I said one day I would just snap? This wasn't the day, but it did make me ponder the possibility the universe just plain didn't want me drinking Ice Java any more.

I settled for Hershey's special dark cocoa powder, which at least had the word "Dutch" on the package. However, I couldn't resist hopping across the street to Safeway, which doesn't have a lot of selection but sometimes carries odd things King Soopers doesn't. Success! I bought both to be safe.

Let me be specific: I had bought everything else I needed at Kings. At Safeway I only got an 8-ounce can of Ghirardelli's. As I paid for the tiny can, I heard someone ask, "Do you need help out today, sir?" Naturally, not being a "sir," at least not for many years now (this happened all the time when I was in college) I didn't look up. When it was apologetically changed to "ma'am" I realized they were addressing me.

In his defense, he was obviously slightly mongoloid, but I still couldn't resist a sarcastic, "With this one little can? No, I think I can manage." I know, I'm a brute. Later telling Tery this story, she said she would have answered, "Yes, thank god! I barely staggered up here to the checkout with it!" Guess we deserve each other.

I got home and excitedly started my Potions class. I used the Hershey chocolate first since that seemed more readily available and I didn't want to get hooked on the Ghirardelli recipe only to have THAT disappear from the country too. Everything seemed to be going well and Prof. Snape was looking on approvingly, until the final step, that called for two tablespoons of instant coffee crystals.

The fact that I was going to such lengths to not lose my chocolate caffeine fix should be evidence enough that I'm not a coffee drinker. Can't stand the stuff. Absolutely vile. But sadly an apparently crucial ingredient in my beloved chocolate caffeine drink.

All the coffee drinkers of the world will probably answer with a deafening "DUH" when I ask, did you know there's a big difference between instant coffee crystals and ground coffee in a can? Don't take my word for it. Try dumping two tablespoons of ground coffee into a previously delicious chocolate syrup and see what happens. If you don't want to, I'll tell you: you get a big yucky clumpy mess of chocolate-coated ground coffee.

In my defense, King Soopers doesn't even carry instant coffee, so I was just trying to find the smallest can of ground coffee I could (note: This may not be true. Tery insists they certainly do. I insist just as hard it was the first thing I looked for, if for no other reason I didn't want a big honking can of coffee sitting around if it didn't work out. The world may never know the truth) (EDIT: The truth exposed! They do carry it. Somehow I didn't make it to the tiny 4-foot section further down the aisle past the 20-foot section of ground coffee. I'm usually more thorough (and observant) than this. I blame it on a lack of caffeine). Thank god Tery got home, ordered me to throw my horrific mess out (I was still hoping the coffee would dissolve while cooling in the fridge) and marched me out the door to Safeway for a jar of instant. I licked a stray spatter of chocolate syrup off my professor as I passed.

This had a much more desirable result. It comes close to the original drink, except the chocolate is wrong. Here's hoping the Ghirardelli's makes the difference.

~*~

As if life isn't already unfair enough, what with having gallstones and being terrified to eat anything, and my favorite morning beverage only being available in Canada, my damn computer died last week.

Not dead dead -- it would power on, then hang on the Windows XP logo screen. Thank god I had the new Windows 7 machine so I could at least work, but due to the aforementioned hardware kerfluffle, I spent three not-fun days operating my work software with keyboard commands rather than my pedal.

I searched the internet for a solution, where someone had posted a big fat lie about "repairing a Windows installation" from the boot disk. I had the boot disk, and saw the option, but selecting it seemed to only bring me back to previous menus repeatedly. The only option it would accept was a total re-format. It broke my heart to do it, but I didn't see where I had much choice.

Fortunately I had already moved most of my really important stuff to the Windows 7, including about 7000 nephew baby pictures that Tery would have had my hide if I lost.

Of course, my Windows software is from 2004 or some similarly long-forgotten era, so just reinstalling all the critical security updates is practically a full-time job in itself. And to my dismay Firefox has mysteriously stopped working -- the browser itself works, but all of my lovely add-ons give me error messages. Finally I (very reluctantly) removed it and trudged back to stupid Internet Explorer, which isn't as fabulous but at least doesn't tempt me to waste half my day uninstalling and reinstalling it in an utterly futile bid to get my add-ons back.

I even gave Google Chrome a try, hoping it might be close to Firefox. Did you know that Google Chrome isn't compatible with the Google toolbar? Madness.

I also was without my pedal for three days because did you know when you do a clean install of Windows, you lose your sound drivers? Me neither. I lost a day trying to track them down before it occurred to me to just go to the manufacturer's site.

I really hate computers. It seems the more I learn about them, the more difficult they become.