Friday

[prillalar]

♫ I'm not sure why I'm posting every day this week. I can't say I've had much of interest to report.

♫ There were many cool moments in last night's nerve-wracking hockey game, including when the organist played Bad Romance. ♥

♫ The Trouble with Decaf, A Short Rant Essay by Hal
I am, once again, transitioning to decaf coffee. The most difficult thing about it, and one of the main reasons I will, eventually, fall off the wagon yet again, is that it is nearly impossible to buy a cup of drip decaf in a coffee shop. They will happily make you a decaf americano for about 1.5 times the price but I do not like americanos. They do not taste the same as drip coffee.

When I'm on full caffeine, there are any number of local coffee places I can and do support. When I'm on decaf, there's only Starbucks. And now, even Starbucks only makes decaf in the mornings. If I get there after 11am, I'm shit out of luck. (Also, if I get there too early, they may not have the decaf on yet. It's always a gamble.)

Of course, I can -- and do -- make my own decaf at work. But part of the pleasure of drinking coffee at all is the walk to the coffee shop and the little zap of pleasure I get from spending my $2 on something I enjoy. I'm having to fall back on buying iPhone apps to get my zap!

What's the solution? I don't think there is one. Except to wander the earth alone and unloved, my empty travel mug in my hand.

Or I could switch to tea.

Comments

[mefie-toi.livejournal.com]

I had to switch to decaf tea and that's even harder to find :( So I feel your pain!

[prillalar]

Yeah, if you want decaf black tea and not just a tisane of some sort, I bet it's difficult. I like roiboss a lot too but the coffee places never seem to have just plain roiboss -- it's always got some freaky flavour attached to it.

[mefie-toi.livejournal.com]

I don't like many herbal teas much because the flavour is rarely strong enough. I like English Breakfast or Earl Grey.

[longleggedgit.livejournal.com]

It's times like these I'm glad I was never a big coffee person, because at least it's not tricky to find good decaf tea options if you don't want caffeine! Coffee has always given me stomach problems so I only drink it once in a great while when I REALLY need a jolt, otherwise I'm tea all the way. Granted, tea doesn't wake me up even half as much as coffee does, so if I needed that buzz to get me out of bed in the morning, I'd pretty much be SOL.

[prillalar]

If it were just the buzz I needed, I could do like one of my friends and take caffeine pills. But there's so much ritual and emotion wrapped up in coffee drinking, which is harder to let go of than the physical jolt.

It's like when I had to give up beer (it's a migraine trigger now). Actually not drinking beer wasn't too difficult. But letting go of my image of myself as a beer drinker was HARD.

[longleggedgit.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I hope beer never turns into a trigger for me. I too would be sad to give up my title as a beer drinker. :(

[dejla.livejournal.com]

Personally, I like tea. It would be something different in the morning, and you can buy tea at almost any coffee shop (although you may get fobbed off with Lipton, feh).

It does seem a shame that they don't offer decaf, especially in this day of people worrying about additives and such.

Maybe you could have one cup of caffeinated coffee in the morning then switch to decaf?

[prillalar]

I do still make my morning cup at home -- I'm down to half-caf with that now.

Possibly I'm just being too fussy about the decaf americanos!

[ekaterinn.livejournal.com]

If you live near a Books-a-Million, their cafe should have decaf coffee available at least in the morning. At least, they did when I was working there in 2008.

[prillalar]

I've never seen one of those. Maybe we don't have them in Canada?

[leviosa8.livejournal.com]

I was wondering why you were posting so often. But it's nice!

I am off coffee for a while. There's this SP character, Tweek?, that finally convinced me. He's my favorite so far. :D

[prillalar]

I think once I used the days of the week as subject lines twice in a row, I felt compelled to go for a whole week. :)

I love Tweek! But life is better when we're not as twitchy as he is.