v32.4: Hard.Times

Morning folks,

-slurp-

I've been having some difficulty getting motivated lately.  We've had some family "troubles" crop up (as they always do) and as a result my mind has been elsewhere.  I won't get into details as those are better left in private.  I do want to apologize to everyone for the lack of updates.

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I have been feeling a bit under the weather this week.  I took Monday and Tuesday off sick from work and yesterday I decided to work from home.  Being sick is never fun.

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I'm getting excited for the Roll-up-the-Rim contest at Tim Horton's.  I plan on winning a lot more this year and like the past few years, I plan on tracking my progress throughout the competition and make a pledge to write every single day.  In the past I've been pretty good about keeping that pledge and I hope to exceed last year's goal and actually write every single day.  It will be a challenge, but where there is coffee to drink, there are musings to write.

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Did you know:

A lot of my musings over Coffee are actually written without a coffee?  Typically when I drive into work I get a coffee at the Tim Horton's near my house.  Since my morning commute can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, I typically start drinking my coffee half way to work.  This means by the time I actually get to work my coffee is nearly gone.  I login, check emails, reply to emails, fix things that are broken, make updates and usually that is my entire day.  Some days I get to write and others I don't.  When I do get around to actually writing, the coffee is gone.  If I had to give a percentage, I would say approximately 30% of my musings are written without a coffee.  Yet I still -slurp-.  Am I slowly going insane?

-slurp-

This also brings up another point I want to make.  On most work days, I typically only have 1 coffee.  In the past I used to be a 2 -3 coffee a day person but lately I've limited myself to just 1 a day.  I'm not sure why or when this trend started, but I noticed it a few weeks ago when I was asked by a co-worker if I wanted to go for a coffee.  I returned to my desk and realized this was the first time in a long time I had actually had a coffee in the afternoon.  I guess you could say I've been so busy at work this past year that I've completely forgotten about coffee during the day and never had a good opportunity to go and get one.

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I think coffee is a magical drink.  I find it oddly disturbing that it was actually discovered at all.  I mean, who decided to take coffee beans, grind them up and put them in water?  What kind of sick demented person tries things like that?  It would be like taking some strange "bean" off a plant in the wild and making a drink out of it.  I suspect there was a lot of trial and error in the early days of man.

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The actual origin of coffee is unknown, but it traces back as far as the fifteenth century.  It is believed that the ancestors of the Oromo people (from Ethiopia) first discovered the rejuvenating properties of the coffee bean and found a way to use it.  Wikipedia states: "The earliest credible evidence of either coffee drinking or knowledge of the coffee tree appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi monasteries of Yemen."  That means we are drinking something that has been around for hundreds of years.  So next time you go and take a sip (or -slurp-) from your cup of coffee, remember the history and appreciate it.

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Well folks, that is all I have for today.  Remember, there are things in the universe we just don't understand.  We have learned to accept them without knowing how or why.  We are a very trusting people.

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Cheers,

Al