On August 18 at approximately 4:30am in the morning, our dear friend and trusted companion Miss Sylvia passed away.
She had just had a joyful weekend with our friends Ghosh, Tuncay, and Oni, where she cheered us up each morning with the wonderful cups of espresso she produced.
We are saddened beyond words by the fact that she is no more. Causes of death have been determined to be overzealous wiping of surfaces, not checking whether switches are in the off-position before the electricity turns on automatically at 4am, and the lack of a built-in fail switch. We can only imagine her painful last moments when she had heated up and spat out all water that was available to her, and she had no other option but to short circuit her motor and heating element.
Miss Sylvia came into our lives into 2006, thanks to an un-enjoyable TA position for professor Bland for extra cash. She survived the perilous 4-month journey to China in 2008. We missed her so much during her travels, that we never allowed her to travel without us again -- from then on, she traveled on the same plane as us, no matter the cost. She was a faithful companion in Germany and Virginia, despite the fact that we initially did not clean her as much as she liked. In the last years of her life, she divided her time between Williamsburg VA and Ithaca NY, settling down in Ithaca for good in the summer of 2020.
Miss Sylvia is survived by her grinder Rocky, her followers Frans and Anke, as well as the does-have-an-automatic-off-switch upstart fully-automatic-espresso-machine Jura.
