Coffee

Coffee. It's 10:05 on a Thursday morning. I have yet to make coffee. It hasn't happened yet. It will, though. Ohhhh, it will.

I don't like coffee black. I like it with enough sugar and fat to make it taste absolutely nothing like real self-respecting coffee should. Creamer is my friend.

I used to be a cappuccino addict back in high school. Some of us crazy folks would show up at the band hall around, say, 6 or 6:30 a.m. Band didn't start till 7 or 7:30 and school itself didn't start till 7:50, so yes, we were nuts, but it A) gave us time to get our homework done before school and B) gave us time to run down to the local QuikTrip and get cappuccino/coffee. Sometimes we also picked up doughnuts either from the QT or the doughnut shop that was on the corner near the school. Coffee and doughnuts? Yes, please. Coffee was required for any road trip taken before 3 or 4 p.m. Did it give us a caffeine high? I guess some people had one. I dunno. I've always had a high tolerance for caffeine. The only time I ever really got a buzz was after chugging an entire 2-liter of Surge soda during a contest with a friend of mine. I believe he won. This was also in high school. Oh, the memories...

Anyway, when I got out of high school and started working, I didn't always leave myself time to go get my beloved cappuccino before I had to be at the office. Pepsi A particular brand of pop was my alternate caffeine source for those dreary afternoon hours, but even that slipped by the wayside when I got pregnant with M1. For a long, long time, I went without any caffeine at all. I didn't think I was a fan of creamer because one of those tiny little cups doesn't do diddly-squat to flavor what I consider a "real" cup of coffee, and getting two kids out of the car to run into a convenience store for coffee isn't realistic on any level. That's a luxury relegated to people with older kids or kids in school or the working moms who manage to get out the door early enough to have that extra time.

Then my friend C introduced me to her creamer of choice, a caramel macchiato flavored substance that brought back beautiful memories of jump-starting cars in the school parking lot in the rain (I had a rechargable jumper kit in my car) and sitting around playing marathon games of ERS while wondering if one of our other friends had managed to successfully hack the band hall printer so he could shrink down our history class vocabulary list to palm size. Nobody saw the point of having vocab tests in history. So nobody studied. And yet we all passed.

We called that "cooperative learning."

I had to go to the store and pick up some of that caramel macchiato creamer. It was a gateway drug. I have since experimented with many other flavors in my morning cuppa joe. The caramel macchiato is still my favorite. There's just nothing like puttering around the house with the smell of sugared-up coffee in your hand. It truly is a life-giving substance.

It's 10:30 a.m. now. I think I'll go make some.