Sunday morning routines are sacred in our home. So is Sunday morning coffee. My husband gets up to make coffee and brings me a cup while I’m still in bed. (I’m incredibly spoiled.) I read The London Times, while he reads The New York Times. Coffee in bed is our way of spending quiet time together, each immersed in our own intellectual pursuits, yet cocooned in a blanket of togetherness.
coffee
Home Made Simple Coffee Guide
If you know me, you know my love for coffee. I’ve written multiple posts about my passion for all things related to coffee and how I’ll never take it for granted. Home Made Simple, the great site by Proctor and Gamble, had me write a Coffee Guide.
Remember, it’s a guide, and everything all comes down to your own taste preferences. Take time to experiment and see where you can take your coffee.
You can find my Coffee Guide for Home Made Simple here: http://www.homemadesimple.com/en-us/foodandrecipes/pages/coffee-guide.aspx
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The morning ritual of coffee
Today, while preparing my coffee, I realized it was more than just a morning boost of courage. It’s a ritual, something I do that starts my day, whether my body is ready to start or not. This ritual of grinding dark, oily, fragrant beans, and filling the pot with cold, filtered water. I anxiously wait for the bell to ring as it finishes the cycle. I’m mesmerized. Time stands still.
As I wait, I think about pouring that inky black goodness into my heavy porcelain cup, sitting it on my saucer and carrying it to the table. Then I grab the tiny, white porcelain pitcher, just big enough to hold the creamy half and half I’m going to weave into this beautiful obsidian pool.
Sitting at the table, looking at this cup of what others consider just a cup of coffee, I start the ritual of pouring the milky white cream into the depths of it’s oily blackness. It swirls, dripping to the bottom, rising to the top, creating a chocolate color that is beauty in itself.
Before the first sip, I sniff and inhale the aroma of roasted beans, mixed with water and cream, that has created this perfume of notes. Some bitter chocolate; mixed with brown sugar and earth.
Like the hummingbirds seeking sugary juice on my deck, coffee is the nectar of morning.
Swallowing, my tongue is coated like dew-covered grass, with a fragrant, heady, almost erotic, awakening of senses. My taste buds spring to life, my throat welcomes the rush of heat and my body takes in the organic electricity that is caffeine, awakening my brain.
It’s my private morning ritual, setting the tone for my day.
Coffee Shop Voyeurism
Voyeurism. Most people think of peeping toms, looking into the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the people there or being sexually voyeuristic. Today I am unleashing my inner voyeur, sitting in a coffee shop and checking out the people that are coming and going.
There are the coffee drinkers, whose voice sounds like they had a pack of Marlboro’s for breakfast. Then, the bleached blondes who are drinking skinny lattes, heavy foam. When, in reality, a true latte should have no foam. You want to tell them they are drinking cappuccino’s, but they don’t like the coffee flavor. Yeah. There are the people on the laptops, like myself. Some working, others poseurs. Look, I have my iPad beside my MacBook, talking on my iPhone and I am doing absolutely nothing but discussing the Grateful Dead and how Jerry would’ve loved my Dead Head ways. Bite me.
The boy to my left studying and listening to tunes. He is ultra polite, and helped me move my table so I could get seated. The man to my right is on his second “meeting”. It’s more gossip, as the man meeting him is sadly unemployed, but if you are going to bash people that don’t hire you in public, did you really need to be hired by them in the first place? I wish him well on his job search, as well as good karma.
The man across from me, hot coffee, lid off. With a Naked juice, his eyeglasses case and won’t take his bagel/muffin out of the bag. He’s nibbling. There is the single man that has been sitting at the large table, for six, for an hour. Reading the paper. All alone. Pompous. His Burberry scarf, shoes and jacket just add to the arrogance as his look dares anyone else to sit there.
The fashionistas area in out in full force today. Walking around like they are the best thing this retail establishment has seen and looking down on we the people of jeans and long-sleeved t’s land. I want to stand up and instead of saying “We the People of these United States”, say “We the chunky, tired people of the under-caffeinated”, but I don’t feel that would go over well.
So, while I am in the middle of my necessary narcissism, I am also enjoying watching everyone while being. It’s sociological study without being scientific. Watching people do nothing but move in and out, a slave to the legally addictive stimulant they are consuming in the great land of innocuous, cheap, multi-faceted consumerism known as the “coffee shop”.
Lisa is a lifestyle blogger, writer and social media strategist living in Charlotte, NC. 
