Ice Milk

As you may have heard mention of a time or two, I get my milk (and sometimes eggs or the most delicious peanut butter chocolate ice cream ever) delivered to my doorstep once a week by Oberweis Dairy.

Now, as you also may have heard, Butter does not like delivery people of any sort. And the Oberweis delivery person who comes around 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning is, in Butter's world, particularly evil.

I convinced Conservative Boy to deal with Butter's late-night freak-0uts each time the milk came but finally—finally—I caved in and said I'd cancel so he'd stop destroying our sleep. Only the very nice Oberweis people did not want to lose my business and asked if we might make different arrangements.

So I agreed to try placing the milk cooler at the end of our driveway instead of on the front step. And last week it worked perfectly—Butter didn't stir.

But this week he's been a particularly restless fellow—barking at things a few times each night. And so the milk delivery did cause him to bark last night—but only for a moment, and only like he does whenever a car passes on our quiet street too late at night.

And so this morning at about 6 a.m. I headed out in my PJs and Conservative Boy's exceptionally massive down coat (his Michelin Man coat, if you will) to bring the cooler back to the front step. That was when I discovered the first-ever Oberweis fatality: It was so cold last night that the milk froze and the bottle shattered. Well, not so much shattered as exploded in the middle, so that I opened the cooler to find the bottom covered in a milky, glassy slush.

Usually I bring the milk in at 2 a.m. since Butter makes sure I know it has arrived anyway. But now that it's at the end of the driveway and he doesn't bark long enough to really wake me up fully, I figured I could leave it in the cooler until morning. Apparently, that won't work when it gets this cold. Sniff. Lesson learned.

(On a side note, to whoever reads this blog and recently decided to try Oberweis for yourself, thanks for mentioning my name! I received a most generous $50 referral credit this week, which blunted the pain of one lost bottle. And please don't let my bottle-shattering tale deter the rest of you from milk deliveries. It's quite handy and most delicious!)