Woo-hoo coffee!

I'm back on the coffee. Phew! That was a crazy month of not drinking any! I started taking anti-anxiety meds, so I can once again be friends with coffee. However, I am not drinking the 12 cups per morning that I was before I burned myself out on it. For awhile there, even the smell of it made me ill. Funnily enough, I did the exact same thing last Thanksgiving Break. I wonder if it will happen again next Thanksgiving?

Part of the problem is that there is just a lot of crappy, nasty-tasting, weak coffee out there. Which leads me to make the following appeal. (Oh, and coffee makes me kind of mean).

Dear middle-aged ladies who work at Starbucks:
Please don't be making my lattes. You can never get it right. I always know before you hand me my standard double-tall-skinny vanilla latte that you are confused by the "skinny" part of my request and are wondering whether when I say skinny I mean just skim milk or skim milk and sugar-free syrup.

I don't know what happened to last year's decree that from now on "skinny" at Starbucks refers to the combination of skim milk and sugar-free syrup, but after about two convienient weeks of only having to use one word to describe two components of my standard latte, you all became confused at the word "skinny."

Now it's nearly impossible to get the most important component of my coffee right, (the double part, i.e. two shots of espresso), because you all get so hung up on the mf-ing sugar content of the syrup. Honestly I could care less what kind of milk or syrup you put in my latte. You could put goat piss and sand in there for all I care; the important thing is that there be TWO shots of espresso to keep the cloyingly sweet syrup from making my latte too sugary and therefore NASTY--especially if we're talking sugar-free syrup, which is at least 1000 times sweeter than regular syrup.

So from now on please leave the latte-making to the youngsters because--whether perky or sullen--they understand that a latte is not a Diet General Foods International Caffe Vienna, and therefore they recognize the importance of the espresso content.

Thanks,
Jenny

Random Bits

If someone told you that your office Christmas party would take place at the Nampa, Idaho Olive Garden, would you think it was just a bad joke? Like from one of those really lame wanna-be mockumentary sitcoms on TBS? Or a comedy sketch written by high school sophomores? Well, it's no joke; my office Christmas party is literally going to be held at the Olive Garden in Nampa, Idaho. This is so amazingly lame that I'll not comment further, except to say that I may have to get a part-time job elsewhere just so I may attend a cool Christmas party. (Though I am grateful to have a job and therefore an office Christmas party to attend.) I did an image search for "Nampa Olive Garden" and here is one photo that I found, by Shawn Records, titled Lena's House, Nampa (I can't post it here because that would be stealing). I don't know what it has to do with the Olive Garden, but it accurately sums up my attitude toward the Nampa Olive Garden. Check out the rad photography website where I found it, called Hey, Hot Shot!.

Have you ever worked with someone who was well-meaning but annoying? Today in the break room, I had a sandwich to heat up. As I went to place it in the toaster oven, a coworker who was heating something in the microwave grabbed a plate out of the cupboard and insisted, "Maybe you should put this under it!" "I don't mind if the bread gets burned," I told her, but she insisted, "I'm just worried the cheese will melt all over and make a big mess!" It's true that the sandwich contained Havarti cheese, which is the meltiest cheese on the planet (mmm, melty cheese), and it's also true that when anything falls into the toaster oven and burns it smells up our entire building. So maybe I was being a bit cavalier about my sandwich-heating, but I am an adult, goshdarnit. My coworker expressed her intention to place a sign in the break room reading "Your mother does not work here." I found this a bit ironic.

I found a cool website called The Daily Aphorism, which publishes a bold-font aphorism each day. You can print them off or subscribe to have an aphorism emailed to you daily. Today's aphorism is "the mundane is to be cherished," a quote by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. This is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, which is why I printed it off and used it as the decoration for my decorate-your-own coffee mug. I purchased this mug about 6 months ago but couldn't find anything I really wanted to display on it until now.

Speaking of coffee, I've gone without coffee for the past several days and I find I am much less cranky and irritable. I usually drink coffee from the time I wake up until my lunch break at 12:30, but I've discovered that coffee really amps up my anxious, aggressive, and grumpy tendencies. It also seems to rev up my appetite, and some days by midmorning my stomach growls and churns like it's trying to digest my internal organs. I've backed off from coffee, at least for now, but I still drink caffeinated tea and soda, (tea is what I'm drinking out of that mug) . Cutting out coffee definitely takes the edge off, since, as some of you know, I can be a bit irascible at times. ;)