"You must choose one"

Recently I was subjected to a dilemma of frightful proportion, one in which I had to make a choice between two things of great importance, a choice that, while ensuring me one of the two, ensured that I'd have to forego the other. It was awful.

It started with me doing a fair job of cleaning my basement, which is not a job for the faint-hearted, as those here who've seen it can attest.

After a few hours of work, I went up to the refrigerator and grabbed the last beer in the house, taking it back down to the basement to savor it as I surveyed my accomplishment with pride.

Arriving back in my newly-clean basement, I went to open my icy-cold and refreshing beer and then realized that this brand required a bottle opener. I have bottle openers, but alas, they're all back upstairs. Not feeling like making the trip back up, I walked over to the cast-iron stove in my basement and attempted to use the edge of the stove to knock the bottle top off. Well I screwed it up and shattered the neck, and a fair quantity of glass shards dropped down into the beer.

When I finished with my anguished cry of loss, I sat down and thought for a second. Perhaps I could still save this delightful frosty beverage if I filtered it somehow. But what to use for a filter? Of course! Back upstairs I ran, back into the kitchen to the cupboard by the coffee maker. A coffee filter. Brilliant!

Then came another cry of anguish, for I realized that I was down to my last coffee filter, and being somewhat addicted to caffeine, I desperately wanted a cup of coffee after having the beer. If I used the last filter to save the beer, I couldn't have the coffee; if I used the filter for coffee, no beer. What to do, oh, what to do?

Then I realized that I had tea bags. Screw it--tea's as good as coffee for a caffeine hit. I used the filter for the beer then made tea.

Moral of the story: keep more beer and coffee filters in the house.

The end.