Coffee Chronicles

I didn’t realize I had a coffee addiction till I saw it all laid out on the table at my yard sale last weekend. Just how many different coffee pots can one person have? Apparently, lots because there they were ready to be sold to the highest bidder.

I was never a coffee drinker until after my second child. Our children are eighteen months apart and their infant months are a complete sleepless blur. I never even thought about drinking coffee until my father-in-law came to visit shortly after the birth of our second child. He loves instant coffee; some International Coffee sugary stuff that makes me teeth even hurt thinking about. When it was time for him to return home to Arizona we realized I had bought too many cans of the International Coffee, we had probably three extra. It was shortly after 9-11 and powder in a tin can was a big no, no. My father-in-law is the “king of frugal” and he hated leaving the stuff. I promised to give it a try and if I didn’t like it I would leave it in the fridge until he returned.

Funny how other’s cheapness can seem so weird but mine seems so normal to me. He saves tin foil, rinses out plastic sandwiches bags and reuses them, saves the cotton in pill bottles, the list goes on and on. He is extreme frugal but he also grew up in the Great Depression and truly knows what it is like to be hungry, suffering, and poor.

I can only imagine how wasteful day-to-day living must look to him. In our house, I am the saver and my husband is the spender but when my father-in-law is in the house, frugal rules!

I tried the International Coffee shortly after he left. I went from a tired mommy of two infants to a tired mommy with a little coffee edge! The stuff was amazing but very sugary. I decided to buy a cheap $10.00 coffee maker; it was red with a glass decanter. I used the International Coffee as a creamer to spruce up the coffee a bit. That red coffee maker didn’t last long it was cheap and the glass on the decanter was really thin. I cracked it in the sink washing it several months after buying it.

I upgraded the coffee maker to a $20.00 one but the decanter was still glass. After having the coffee maker for about a year the glass around the lip of the decanter broke and I sliced the very tip of my thumb off. I remember standing at the sink cleaning dishes while hearing my toddlers play in the background, next minute the sink was filled with my blood. I called my neighbor next door, thank God she was home, and told her I was about to faint. She ran over to find two crying toddlers and me with my hand wrapped in towels lying on the bathroom floor. My neighbor was awesome, still is awesome, she took me to the emergency room, and from that day on I swore off glass decanters. (My thumb is fine now I just don’t have feeling in the very tip.)

I didn’t want to spend the money on a coffee pot with a stainless steel decanter because they are so expensive so I started drinking instant Folgers coffee. The stuff wasn’t my favorite but it was the safest.

I found a coffee pot on sale with two stainless steel travel mugs that made two separate cups of coffee on each side. I liked it a lot at first but you really had to use the travel mugs to make the coffee and the travel mugs irritated me to drink from. I wasn’t going anywhere, I was at home with the kids and I didn’t need that reminder from my travel mugs. Nothing worse than the feeling that your coffee is mocking you!

I shared my story of my mean mocking coffee pot with my husband. I am sure it sounded pitiful because the next day he surprised me a large Mr. Coffee, coffee maker with a stainless steel decanter.

Then this year for my birthday my mom bought me a Keurig coffee maker. I love the thing, it is by far the safest coffee pot I have had and the easiest. However, the coffee can get a little pricey. I purchase my coffee at this little coffee shop that sells individual k-cups. You get 24 flavors of your choice for 12.95. I only buy the dark roasted coffee and then I use each one twice (right after one another I don’t let the k-cup sit around). Each cup of coffee costs me about .27 cents.

I am not sure what my father-in-law will say if he comes to visit, .27 cents for a cup of coffee will seem outrageous and I know that he will refuse to drink it. Instead, he will boil his water in a teakettle on my stove and use his instant International Coffee. Or he will try it once and be as completed hooked on it as I am.

Some of us need coffee to get our work done, others of us work to make money for our coffee addiction. I think I might officially be the latter.  I live on a budget but coffee money has its own column.

Sarah Forhan