Saturday, October 10, 2009

Mmmm....Coffee

I started drinking coffee when I was in 6th grade. Not every day of course, only on Sundays. I was the youngest person in my Sunday School class by two years and the rest of my class drank coffee. Church coffee. The kind made in the plug-in urn, made too strong with cheap beans and only powdered creamer and sugar packets to temper the taste. I hated it but I wanted to be cool. I have since decided I am okay with being a dork but I do love coffee, and because of this wonderful introduction to the addiction of the bean I can now drink almost any coffee, black if I need to.
In high school we had an open campus and there was a neat little coffee shop just down the street, we also had a few great teachers who "allowed" us a break to run and grab a coffee. The price back into class was one for them too. Mostly this was in yearbook class and we had to prove we had our work mostly done, and I'm sure many of our photo captions are the direct by-product of caffeine induced creativeness.
I used to hold to the idea that decaff coffee is not really coffee. It needs the caffeine to be legit. I have since blurred this line and drink decaff. Some of the time. During each of my pregnancies I cut back to one cup of coffee on Wednesdays and Sundays. Wednesdays because we have our Mom's group and when all the other moms are standing around with a steaming cup of joe I bend to the unspoken peer pressure and fill up a cup and Sundays because what can I say, I have this thing for church coffee. Well, actually the church has an espresso machine and I'm usually helping run it. Lately I've been drinking it more often and I've tried my darnedest to cut back but alas the spirit is willing but...okay, the spirit is not so willing. There is something so comforting in the smooth rich, creaminess of a good cup of coffee, a comfort not found in tea or cider or even hot chocolate. I've even tried Teeccino, which is an herbal based caffeine free coffee alternative but there's nothing quite like the real thing. A month or so ago I decided that I'd switch to decaff so that my body wasn't dependent upon the caffeine. I bought one bag of decaff and one of regular and slowly mixed them together in my morning cup, upping the decaff every day until my morning cup was solely decaff and my body hadn't noticed the difference. Beautiful plan until we ran out of decaff and I really wanted coffee. Thus I am back where I started and need to go buy more decaff and try again.
And now that my cup is empty this morning I must get to work.

3 comments:

Candice Parisi said...

Nice, and you're tall too. I say that because I was told when I was little that drinking coffee stunts your growth and so I thought I should only drink it when I was full grown. I did have a couple sips of my mom's coffee now and then because she put tons of sugar and cream which is that way I drink it now. I know what you mean about not wanting to get addicted too, but sometimes you just need a pick-me-up. :)

Lisa said...

this is great!! you are a great writer... i'm glad you like coffee too... and i know what you mean about church coffee. you can go to any church anywhere in the USA, and it's pretty much guaranteed that the coffee will taste the same!! :) i think it has something to do with costco and other warehouse stores... :)
yay coffee! by the way, i'd never heard of "teeccino!" sounds horrible... :)
on a tea note, thanks again for blessing me that one day with all the teas and the loose-leaf "steeper" (not sure what it's called). i still love tea, too.

Candi said...

LOL! This is such a great post I had to read it to our kids (who have been drinking coffee since they graduated from the sippie cup). We decided a while back that we were going to quit drinking coffee because we feared we had all grown addicted to it. Royally! After three days, I finally caved because we found that our marriage seemed dull and we honestly had no personality without it running through our vains. Within minutes after drinking our first sips we were laughing together and felt so... well... happy :) Our kids cheered that day when they heard the coffee ban was lifted and we will only read things that are PRO coffee now so we have a bunch of ammo to back up our decision to never live without it again. Thanks for the laugh and your creative writing!