I Love Coffee

The title says it all - I love coffee. Do I need a cup or two to function properly in the morning? Am I addicted to caffeine?

Could be. I have actually quit drinking it once or twice, but always come back. Why? The answer is two-fold actually:

1. A coffee habit isn't exactly a big problem. As addictions go its legal, socially acceptable, and doesn't generally leave people on the street.
2. I love coffee.
3. It is really annoying me that I put this in as a numbered list, but the numbers are getting clipped by the picture of the caffeine molecule.
4. I want to keep the picture, I think its cool. Plus its public domain, and the first picture I found of coffee beans wasn't. I didn't feel like looking for a second coffee bean picture.
5. I think I ran this list out long enough now that you can actually see some numbered items and maybe now you can tell that "A coffee habit..." was number one and "I love coffee" was number two.
6. Ok, I guess the answer wasn't really two fold, it was six-fold. Or five-fold anyway - maybe this one doesn't count.
7. In its final published form, the numbers don't seem to be clipped, possibly leaving you somewhat bewildered about numbers 3-6.

As far as I knew until about 1992, coffee "beans" were the little ground pieces that I was so familiar with. But, probably thanks to Starbucks, at some point people decided it would be cooler to make actual coffee beans (which are bean shaped, not the individual ground pieces as I had thought) available to the normal man. I guess its is all because somebody invented a coffee grinder smaller than a Buick that could be sold to every household in America. This was neatly followed by the home espresso machine. The espresso machine is what you use if instead of spending three minutes making eight cups of coffee you want to make one cup of coffee in just under an hour - before cleaning time.

What prompted this rant against "fancy" coffee from somebody who loves coffee as much as myself? My office has a trick coffee grinder. It is a fancy, high-end, semi-industrial model with a dial you turn that allows you to specify how much coffee you want to grind. It then randomly grinds an amount between one pot's worth of beans, and one quarter teaspoon. We started getting ground coffee again, which I am incredibly thankful for. Believe it or not, when a ziploc bag of coffee is stored inside tupperware (or a non-copyrighted tupperware-like facsimile), it just doesn't matter - to me anyway. I find the trick grinder so irritating I am writing this even though we're back on "normal" coffee. Plus I wanted to write, and this was the only thing that came to mind.

So, a couple of words to the wise:

1. Just buy "coffee", not beans. At least for first thing in the morning. After your first cup you can better handle grinding, cleaning, etc.
2. Don't stand between Bill and the coffee, at least not before 10:00a.m.