coffeeless

For a significantly large part of the day yesterday we had no coffee. I find it just a bit hard to admit this because in our house I am Java Man, responsible for making the coffee, maintenance of all coffee-making gadgets (I have a growing collection, natch) and, most important of all, ensuring there is an adequate supply of coffee beans on hand so that there will never be a coffee-less day. Well, yesterday I failed my charge. I hang my head in shame.

All that remained of our bean supply was a single tablespoonful, maybe twenty beans that rattled around in the bottom of the jar on the coffee shrine. My Darling B gamely ground it up and made about a cup of what looked like tea but had less flavor. She loaded it up with cream and sugar anyway and pretended it was delicious, but I noticed she didn’t finish it.

I made do with a cup of tea. They say that tea has every bit as much caffeine in it as coffee, sometimes more. If that’s true, there’s something else in coffee, but not in tea, that puts me in a good mood. I had a hard time focusing on anything I was doing all morning; I was distracted by just about anything I happened to catch sight of, which I admit isn’t out of character for me under the best of circumstances, but I’m going to blame it on the lack of coffee anyway. I might even go so far as to blame our lack of coffee for my spectacular failure to put the tomato trellis together correctly, what the heck. I think most coffee drinkers would believe that.

After the trellis fiasco I drove up the road to the hardware store to pick up some tomato stakes, a trip that took me right past Java Cat, our local coffee house. Hey, they sell coffee beans! I remembered, And it’s even Fair Trade coffee! I stopped and went in. There wasn’t much of a selection on hand; everyone else in Monona must have misjudged their coffee supply on this long weekend as well. When I put the bag on the countertop, the gal at the register asked, “Just the beans?”

“That’ll do it,” I confirmed.

“Would you like the free coffee?”

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“A bag of beans comes with a free medium coffee,” she explained.

Free coffee? “Well, heck yeah!” And the rest of the day went much better after that.