Until February this year, I was a coffee nut…or maybe coffee bean, to use a more appropriate metaphor. I'd begun innocently enough with the occasional cup my senior year of high school, but my beverage of choice at that time was something more of the carbonated persuasion. Coke. Mountain Dew. Perhaps the occasional Jolt Cola when I could find it. Coffee wasn't my beverage of choice; it just happened to be another avenue through which to flood my body with caffeine.
My first introduction to flavored coffee (not the General Foods International coffee blends, mind you, but the hand-made-by-cheerful-baristas-wearing-aprons-who-also-recommend-the-raspberry-scone coffees) was after I took a job with the airline. On a whim in those early days at my job, before the novelty of travel had worn off, I coerced my best friend to fly with me from Phoenix, AZ, up to Seattle, WA… for a cup of coffee. By that time (early 1996), Seattle was known to Arizonans as the place where people "drank coffee". So we flew up in the morning, rode the bus from the airport downtown, and did the touristy sightseeing thing… with coffee in hand.
Let's take a step forward through linear time to a point in my life when a full night's sleep is a luxury not often found and coffee (in all its forms) is not so much a recreation drink as an addicting necessity to get through the day. On any given Saturday I could siphon the entire contents of our home's 12-cup coffee pot, and decimate a 32-ounce bottle of Coffee-Mate (any flavor will do) in less than two weeks.
As unhealthy a relationship as it could ever be, my love affair with coffee came to a grinding (pardon the coffee bean pun) halt when I came down with bacterial bronchitis in February. I stopped drinking coffee, or anything else that wasn't hot tea or water, and in no time my bronchial coughing fits were augmented to by a wondrous side effect often called caffeine withdrawal.
Every time I coughed, my head was pummeled from above, in front and behind by the mythical gods of caffeine, who seemed persistently intent upon reminding me that I had forsaken their elixir of energy.
As my bronchitis persisted, so too did my resolve not to drink coffee. Okay, so it was so much resolve as an acute awareness that drinking anything with cream in it would send me into more rib-wrenching coughing fits. But it worked, and I have left coffee behind.
Okay, I've actually "snuck" two coffees in the past two weeks, but now I'm done. No more… really.
(sniff, sniff) Hey, did someone go to Starbucks? I smell a venti nonfat caramel macchiato with an extra shot of espresso…
Leia Mais…
My first introduction to flavored coffee (not the General Foods International coffee blends, mind you, but the hand-made-by-cheerful-baristas-wearing-aprons-who-also-recommend-the-raspberry-scone coffees) was after I took a job with the airline. On a whim in those early days at my job, before the novelty of travel had worn off, I coerced my best friend to fly with me from Phoenix, AZ, up to Seattle, WA… for a cup of coffee. By that time (early 1996), Seattle was known to Arizonans as the place where people "drank coffee". So we flew up in the morning, rode the bus from the airport downtown, and did the touristy sightseeing thing… with coffee in hand.
Let's take a step forward through linear time to a point in my life when a full night's sleep is a luxury not often found and coffee (in all its forms) is not so much a recreation drink as an addicting necessity to get through the day. On any given Saturday I could siphon the entire contents of our home's 12-cup coffee pot, and decimate a 32-ounce bottle of Coffee-Mate (any flavor will do) in less than two weeks.
As unhealthy a relationship as it could ever be, my love affair with coffee came to a grinding (pardon the coffee bean pun) halt when I came down with bacterial bronchitis in February. I stopped drinking coffee, or anything else that wasn't hot tea or water, and in no time my bronchial coughing fits were augmented to by a wondrous side effect often called caffeine withdrawal.
Every time I coughed, my head was pummeled from above, in front and behind by the mythical gods of caffeine, who seemed persistently intent upon reminding me that I had forsaken their elixir of energy.
As my bronchitis persisted, so too did my resolve not to drink coffee. Okay, so it was so much resolve as an acute awareness that drinking anything with cream in it would send me into more rib-wrenching coughing fits. But it worked, and I have left coffee behind.
Okay, I've actually "snuck" two coffees in the past two weeks, but now I'm done. No more… really.
(sniff, sniff) Hey, did someone go to Starbucks? I smell a venti nonfat caramel macchiato with an extra shot of espresso…
