For you coffee addicts, and yes I know I am rambling

Have a family member addicted to coffee? Use it to your advantage with today’s top tip.  My Aunt will literally tell people to stop talking and shut up until she has ingested her coffee and the coffee molecules have hit her brain.  My SIL is slightly better, she allows people to talk. My mom just gives people stink eye, which is fine for normal family and friends, but the stink eye gives me flashbacks to my childhood and “disciplinary issues” so I prefer not to go there. 

The best thing you can do for a coffee addict is learn how they make their coffee and try on a series of occasions to do it right, like in the afternoons or after lunch. Then, when you need them to wake up quickly or have a specific reason to want them in a good mood early in the morning (road trip, early appointment, long day), you make it for them and BRING IT TO THEM IN BED or shortly thereafter.  Coffee in this regard is easier than tea, because with tea you have to steep it and it is hard to get right if you aren’t the tea drinker (which coincidentally is the reason why my husband says he lets me make my own tea) but coffee does not require as many intangibles to get it right.  Or you could be easy like my mom and wake up thirty minutes before her to go to the coffee shop and bring it back. By the time you get home it is cool enough to drink.

One of my favorite stories of my aunt (and she probably doesn’t even remember doing this) was one morning we were sitting in Brussels and I was being chatty. I am not really chatty in the mornings but for her I was like Miss Merry Sunshine.  She got into Vice President Mode (she used to be in senior management) and told me in no uncertain terms, like I was an inept underling, to shut it and quickly and let her drink her coffee and read Le Soir in peace.  Well ok then.  Then there was the day when she came to visit two tea drinkers and we had no coffee.  That was bad.  We could have told her we were space aliens and she would not have been more aghast.

I used to be a coffee addict. I told myself that I was a tea drinker, but in reality what I would do would be to have a cup of tea in the morning then have a cup of coffee around ten am, thus not really “waking up” until ten thirty.  I didn’t talk myself out of that lie until last year until I was diagnosed with a health problem and had to stop coffee completely. The hardest part is smelling other people’s coffee in the morning or walking by a café. 

I was always able to stop coffee though.  I went to China for two weeks once and they just did not serve coffee. I had a bunch of tea and that was just fine. The best part about being in China (ok so here you would think a normal person would talk about the architecture or something)  was that they had these big chungs of green tea and in some of our hotels, when you were checking in they would send a cleaning lady up to go make your tea, so when you walked into your room you had a big huge chung (half a liter or so) of green tea waiting for you. That was totally awesome. I could so get into that.  I would seriously go back to China just for that.

Switzerland does not have a go mug culture. For them go mugs are for hiking.  I am mad because Sigg came out a couple years ago with their “urban” line and I got one for my mother and one for myself. It was the perfect size for my purse and the perfect size for travelling.  I am mad because after like six months mine was confiscated by an overzealous Zurich airport employee.  I think I would use go mugs if I could find another Sigg one like the one I had. Then I could save about fifteen minutes in the morning and have podcast and tea on the train. Must think about that.

Tags : coffee addiction, rambling