C6H10N402

I have a fairly severe addiction. To the above mentioned substance. While I don’t abuse the substance per se, I definitely do need a fix on a diurnal basis. As BigGeek and Chip have learned through hard and nasty experience, its best to stay a few arm lengths away until I have imbibed my daily quota and my brain cells have all been sorted out nicely.
This morning as I drove to work, my head ached, my feet tapped themselves. Thank god there was no traffic, I would not have hesitated to run people over. Just kidding. Or not.

Withdrawl looks like this and does not feel good at all.

I went into my cube, fished out my bag and counted dimes and nickels and pennies. I needed $1.60. I found it, ran back down and entered the cafeteria.

Oh! Blessed Caffeine.

Here I am now, bright and chirpy, having downed 16 oz of the finest Columbian that has made its way here through Seattle. My brain can finally get down to work, and people around me are safe. I am fairly tame when I am well caffeinated.

I have been drinking coffee ever since I remember. No, seriously. My mother, many decades ago, weighed the cons of coffee to the pros of milk and decided there was absolutely no harm in stirring a small teaspoon of NesCafe into my morning milk. Which was the only way I drank it. And wait, before you roll your eyes at me, my mom prior to the NesCafe, would try and stir malt-extract-with-fish-oil into my milk.

Anyone remember what it was called? Gluta-something. Blech. Tar tastes better. I still carry emotional scars of the Gluta-something days. After that, I refused to drink milk. My mother claims I refused to drink milk way before that and that Gluta-something was a way to improve its taste (what was she thinking?) and get the additional nutrients into the skinny-minny that I was (I am not any more; I wish I were, but am so not).

So, after going down the rungs by trying to get me to drink Horlicks (yuck), Complan (still yuck, it should be named Complain, not Complan), Bournvita (not bad, but still a bit yuck), she finally settled down on Nescafe. Which sowed the seeds of my addiction.

I try and wriggle my way out of staying overnight in households where they don’t worship the altar of caffeine. Or at least brew a good cup every morning. My dad makes a mean cuppa of filter coffee and my mother-in-law is kindly disposed to it as well. She drinks Bru – which is not bad at all and she whips it up to a nice froth.

In our household, we are a bit snobbish. Beans are carefully selected. We are partial to Colombian. Freshly ground every morning and then brewed with two unbleached filters into a thermally-insulated carafe. Not the hotplate ones – they burn the coffee. Any variations in the quality of water (yes), coffee or filters is met with pouring the brew down the drain, intense cursing, severe withdrawal and re-brewing.

Which is what happened this morning. BigGeek half made the coffee. He rinsed the carafe, and poured water and left it at that. When I came down, I rinsed the carafe, filled the water, ground the beans and brewed. The resulting brew would have put dishwater to shame. It was dilute and BigGeek had used “smelly” water and so I had to throw it out (or water my plants with it). There was no time to re-brew which is how this post started.