Category: Habits

To balance yesterday’s overly negative (but entirely true) post about some of the reasons I hate Christmas, I decided to dedicate today’s post to things I like about the biggest holiday of the year. No doubt you’ve already noticed I said “like” rather than “love”. Call me jaded if you like, but in my old age it takes more to move the needle from like to love. The other thing you’ll notice is that there are only eight things listed. I tried to come up with twelve but failed. Sure, I could have included getting presents, but that’s just tacky. I thought about adding sweet treats to the list but didn’t because I hate the result and alluded to them …

In college I majored in consumer studies and family resource management. Rather than a textbook, many of my professors compiled packets of articles from academic journals and weekly news magazines that we had to purchase from Kinko’s. Nowadays they make this kind of information available to students online. All the weekly news magazines were represented in these packets. But for some reason, the articles in U.S. News & World Report appealed to me more than articles from Time or Newsweek. Within a semester or two, I paid for a subscription to U.S. News & World Report which I continued until last year when they stopped printing magazines and switched to an online format. Staying up on current event is important …

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 …