Coffee Juggling

We’re in Austin for a short visit, staying in one of the hotels in the downtown area. In these circumstances, one of my spousal duties is to get up first and go down to the service area and get two cups of hot coffee for us. This crucial responsibility inevitably requires me to employ the fine art of coffee juggling.

Coffee juggling involves a few important considerations, and a few even more important skills. The considerations involve exercising judgment on how full to fill the cup from the self-service coffee station, and what additional items, if any, you can reasonably bring along with you and the two cups of coffee. A banana, for example, can safely be carried in a pocket, but a muffin would be crushed in a pocket and therefore must be carefully balanced on a coffee cup lid. This dramatically enhances the coffee juggling challenge, so the question becomes: is a tasty muffin worth it? (The answer, incidentally, is always “yes.”)

The skills kick in after you fill your cups and make your additional food selection. The first skill is properly affixing one of those plastic lids to the brimming cup of java, and making sure it is fully engaged, so it won’t fly off on the return journey and lead to hot coffee armageddon. The next skill is figuring out how to shift the full cups of hot coffee in your hands so that you can safely stab the elevator button, and then do so again when you reach your room and have to fish the room key out of your pocket, unlock the door, and then use one hand to open the door knob while precariously balancing two cups of coffee with the other. The fact that the piping hot coffee has fully heated the paper cups and is probably burning your hand by this point just adds to the challenge.

But if your coffee juggling skills remain sharp, and you make it into the room without a drop or a spill, you can start your morning with a welcome feeling of first thing in the morning accomplishment. With the knowledge that you’ve capably performed your first important task and a hot cup of coffee for fuel, you are ready to face the day.

No Enemy But Time

Yesterday the United States Senate voted unanimously to make Daylight Savings Time permanent. If you wondered whether our fractured political bodies could ever agree on anything significant, there’s your answer: in the Senate, at least, Democrats and Republicans alike share a common position on time itself.

Of course, “Daylight Savings Time” is an appealing, but ultimately misleading, name. “Springing ahead” doesn’t actually “save” any daylight, it just shifts it from the morning to the afternoon. There will still be the same amount of sunlight on the shortest days of the year; the only issue is when you want to to experience it. The Senate has cast its lot with the afternooner lobby, which has been making constant inroads on our “Standard time” period over the past few decades, leaving it shorter and shorter. If the House follows suit, and President Biden signs the legislation, the change to permanent DST will literally leave “morning people” in the dark for an hour longer during the winter months.

What would it mean, practically? Well, we wouldn’t have to fiddle with changing our clocks anymore. But if you live in Columbus, or anywhere else that is on the western edge of a time zone, you will experience exceptionally dark mornings during December and January. A Google search reveals that the sun rose in Columbus at 7:50 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, on December 21, 2021, the shortest day of the year–that is, the day with the least amount of sunlight. The shift to permanent DST would mean that the sunrise wouldn’t occur until 8:50 a.m. If you’re someone who’s got to clean snow or ice off your car to get to work, you’ll be doing it in the pre-dawn blackness, and it will feel colder.

The “daylight savings” versus “standard” time debate used to be a contentious one, with farmers, people working first shifts, other early risers, and people worried about kids going to school in the dark lining up on the standard time side. But the political winds have shifted, and we’ve become more of an end of day society that simply isn’t awake to enjoy those first rays of sunshine in the early morning Standard time hours. The fact that the Senate unanimously approved the change tells you all you need to know.

Strong Coffee In The Morning

I like a hot, strong cup of coffee in the morning.

I don’t want coffee that is hotel room strength, so weak and dishwatery that you see the bottom of the cup.  I want a jumbo-sized cup that is jet black and bold, piping hot and steaming.  I don’t care if it stains my teeth or leaves a faint whiff of stale coffee breath.  I’ll gladly trade those unfortunate but remediable consequences for that welcome jolt.

Much as I like a strong cup of coffee, I freely concede that there are reasonable limits to coffee strength.  A former attorney at our firm was legendary for preparing a hair-curling concoction known as Sheldonbrau.  Made with approximately 15 coffee packets and a half pot of water, it could melt the eyeballs of the unwary and dissolve dental fillings.  I don’t go quite that far.

I don’t need to stand a spoon in my morning joe, but I do want to taste that rich, dark, hearty tang that helps to open my eyes and prepare me for the day ahead.  Kish, incidentally, makes it just right.

A Mug To Suit My Morning Mood

Much of my morning blindly follows a routine.  Get up, get dressed, feed the dogs, take them for a walk — all of it happens with mindless mechanical regularity.  The first real decision I must make is the choice of a mug for my morning coffee.

Over the years, Kish and I have accumulated an eclectic collection of coffee mugs.  We began with a set of unadorned white mugs, the kind you might see at a basic diner in any American city.  We’ve added to that baseline through gifts, handouts at seminars or from hotels, hand-me-downs, and purchases at gift shops or college campus stores. We’ve got nice cups and saucers too, mind you, but those are for evening company, not the shot of morning java.  Who wants to be fumbling with fancy saucers when you’re still bleary-eyed, moving from room to room as you get ready for work?

We’ve now got mugs of all colors, shapes and sizes.  Each has its own feel and context, too . . . making the morning choice a particularly devilish one.  I think about my work day ahead and wonder whether this is a day for a big black mug that holds an ocean of joe or for one of the basic, indestructible, well-used white mugs.  If I’m feeling adventurous, I might choose the old-fashioned mug with the tiny round finger hole that looks like it might have once served as the mug where a barber mixed shaving cream before lathering up a customer.  If it’s a weekend, I might go for one of our dog options — but I’m not going to select a puppy-theme mug if I’ve got a tough deposition on the schedule.

A Cool Morning’s Glory

Imagine our delight when Penny and I stepped outside at 5 a.m. this morning and it was . . . cool.  Magnificently, delightfully cool!

After weeks of oppressive temperatures, scalding days and hot, sticky nights, the cool, fresh air was glorious to experience.  I’m guessing that the overnight temperature had dipped into the mid-50s.  It was like a shot of some ultra-powerful energy drink to feel the slight chill on the skin and hairs on my arms.  We moved quickly through the crisp air, our pace keeping us comfortably warm, looking with pleasure at the stars and constellations etched brilliantly in the dark, clear skies.

By the end of the walk, with rose-fingered dawn just peeking over the eastern horizon, I happily realized that, for the first time in weeks, my shirt was not wringing wet with sweat at the end of our walk.  After our journey through the welcome chill, my hot cup of coffee tastes especially good.

Those Intriguing 5-Hour Energy Commercials

If you’ve watched a basketball game on TV lately — particularly on the Big Ten Network — you’ve seen the commercials for the 5-hour Energy product.  It’s an energy drink that comes in a little bottle that features the silhouette of a guy sprinting over rocks on the label.

There are three ads.  One features a frumpy woman who needs help getting up for her morning workout; she decides to skip coffee, slugs down some 5-hour Energy instead, and next we see her, well-coiffed and in a perky workout outfit, smiling as she strides on the treadmill.  Another shows a guy with bed head who hates mornings and has only 20 minutes to get ready for work.  Coffee would take too long so he reaches in the cupboard, takes a drink of 5-hour Energy, smacks his lips, and shortly is jogging down the stairs, straightening his tie and ready to kick ass at work.

Our favorite commercial begins with the perils of coffee drinking.  Coffee takes so long and is such a pain!  A glum guy spoons grounds into a coffee pot.  Arrgh! An executive fumbles with his coffee cup and papers as he leaves his house.  I hate it when that happens! An incredibly antsy woman,  neck veins popping, looks at her watch and audibly sighs as she waits impatiently in line at a coffee shop.  (Seriously, does this woman really need more energy?  She already looks totally amped and ready to take a swing at the next person who hesitates in giving their coffee order.  After she gets some caffeine she probably charges out the door and bites the head off a chicken.)  And then we cut to the relaxed guy in his kitchen.  He eschews the horrors of the coffee grind.  Instead he takes a little sip of the product, nods with satisfaction, looks at his watch, sits back down, puts his foot on the kitchen table, and leisurely reads his paper.  It makes you wonder why he didn’t have time to make coffee in the first place.

The commercials suggest that the product works instantaneously.  This concerns me.  I’m not sure my aging system can handle a substance that provides energy faster than an injection of liquid adrenalin.  The idea of taking a swig from a tiny bottle of room temperature liquid doesn’t have much appeal, either.  I’m not interested in sprinting over rocks, and I really don’t want to find out what happens when that five-hour burst comes to an end.  I therefore conclude that I am not in the target market for this product.  I just wish I could avoid their commercials.