My Coffee Habit


Okay. I drink a lot of coffee. In recent years I’ve cut back…some. We’re still a two-pot-a-day household but now the afternoon pot is only eight cups instead of the twelve my mornings require.

In my humble opinion, the coffee we make at home is the best anywhere. We have a Cuisinart Grind-N-Brew coffeemaker and only use Eight O’Clock coffee beans. I put the beans and water in at night, push the button, and at exactly six o’clock the next morning, the sound of the beans grinding wakes us up. The second pot goes on as soon as I get home from work–earlier on weekends.

Years ago, I put cream and sugar in my coffee. That stopped when my coworkers would use creamer and sugar but refused to bring any in to the office. Now I drink it black and strong. I like our coffee so much that I’m hardly able to drink coffee made elsewhere. It’s a curse. When we travel we take our own coffee, a small grinder, and a coffeemaker.

We don’t, however, take our coffee cups. When I was growing up, I remember Mom and Dad arguing about coffee cups. We had a maybe four of the white ceramic cups they both preferred. Dad routinely took them to work with him. I remember his car always smelled like spilled coffee and cigarettes. Mom bitched because he wasn’t very good at remembering to bring them home which forced her to drink her coffee from an inferior mug.

As I was emptying the dishwasher today, I realized that my partner and I are equally particular about our coffee mugs. I prefer the brighter colors from our assortment of Fiestaware–yellow, red, and orange–in that order. I can use light or navy blue if necessary, but grumble if I’m forced to drink from the maroon mug or one of the numerous turquoise mugs in our collection.

My partner uses a nearly spherical crockery-type mug (with a flat bottom of course) first, then a chipped up white coffee cup from his youth with the Bearenstain Bears on it, and if necessary, one of two turquoise Fiestaware mugs we have that annoy me because they are just a tiny bit taller than the rest and have over-sized handles on them.

Dad didn’t have a to-go coffee cup. I have two that hold at least two and maybe three full cups of coffee. They’re identical, and I’ve had them since at least 1990.  Once upon a time, they had some kind of logo on them that long ago came off in the dishwasher. One of them accompanies me to the office every day. It didn’t take my partner long to learn to leave my damn to-go cups alone.

I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Now my partner has his own to-go cups. Fortunately, we have enough coffee mugs that they’re not a source of conflict here in…

My Glass House


4 responses to “My Coffee Habit”

  1. My husband has a fondness for several cups especially one of those old glass coffee cups with the wheat sprigs on them that came out of a box of detergent in the 1960’s. He took a cup of coffee with him from his mom’s house in the cup and never returned it. He also likes the IHOP cup that reached our house when a daughter was a server there. He like smaller porcelain cups.

    I like pottery cups nicely turned and crockery cups that hold at least a pint. I have some to-go cups, but none of them are adequate and we have disconnected lids and cups all the time. Another daughter migrated a good deal of our cups to her house over the years.

    Plastic cups just sit in the cabinet as last choices if everything is dirty. We seem to use more mugs than anything else around our house.

  2. One of the biggest hissy fits I never got to pitch was over a coffee mug. At an office where I used to work, we had a Secret Pal thing going on. For Valentine’s Day, my pal gave me a shiny golden coffee mug full of little red-hot hearts. I loved that mug! Everyone in the office knew it was MY mug. I drank from it every day. Imagine my horror one cold, rainy, winter morning when I found one of the insurance clerks drinking her coffee from MY shiny golden coffee mug. I thought I would spontaneously combust. How dare she touch my mug! Much less fill it with coffee, sugar and nasty powdered creamer. And get her lipstick on it! I was ashamed at how much I wanted to climb over her desk and wrench it from her skinny little fingers. I kept finding excuses all morning to return to the break room, to see if she had finished with it. When I found it in the sink, I scrubbed and scrubbed my shiny golden mug. And from that day forward, I never left it in the cabinet, but kept it safely tucked away at my desk. Hmph. The nerve of some people.