Random Tuesday Thoughts - With Caffeine

The Un Mom is starting a new career.  Something about godfathers and horse heads.  I'm hoping she'll have a BOGO for this service(it's too hard to choose just one).  Be sure and go over to her blog for some Randomness.

(Special thanks to Twenty Four At Heart, her pumpkin spice latte tweet gave me my inspiration for RTT)

TGIT!  RTT always seems to get me back on track for the week and assuage my lack of Monday blogging guilt.  Mondays are just crazed days for me and will remain so until November.  Here is my typical Monday:

Get up at 6:00am, make breakfast and school lunches and go teach a class from 7:45-8:45

Arrive back home and re-orient my home from an Entropy laden weekend (that's if I don't have some kind of appointment to go to).  For you non-science types, entropy occurs when a system goes from a state of order to a state of disorder or chaos.  Thus, weekends and any given day, my home experiences entropy.

Go teach another class from 12:30pm-1:30pm.  The rest of the week my classes are each 90 minutes long.

Run back home, attempt to finish chores, make dinner, spend a few minutes of quality time with my hubby (if he's not working) and my youngest child who feels like a Monday orphan.

Leave at 4:40 to begin a carpool and arrive by 5:15 at band practice

From 5:30-8:30, teach ten distracted and fatigued but hard-working young ladies marching drill and equipment work.

8:45-9:15 Reverse carpool

9:30-11:00 Any remaining chores, and hopefully, some time reading my favorite blogs (enough brain power to read but not enough to write).

Sometimes I make it to bed by 11:00 and sometimes I don't.

Currently Mondays and Wednesdays are like this.  For most of October it will also be this way Fridays and Saturdays.

My title mentioned something about caffeine...

I am a caffeine addict (Hi, my name is NeCole and I'm a caffeine addict, it's been zero days since my last caffeine intake).  So yeah, I'm not in recovery.  Once in a while, I get clean from caffeine, but eventually I go right back to it.  I started drinking coffee when I was eleven years old.  Yes, eleven!  All of my family drank coffee and being as I was somewhat of a hyper child, my doctor advised my parents to give it to me.  Give a hyper child coffee???? Whaaa....t???? Apparently, the theory was that based on homeostasis, caffeine will actually mellow out a hyper kid.  Interesting theory.  Being a biologist, I understand the theory, but having experienced it, I am somewhat skeptical.  This was back in the good old sixties, before Ritalin and Adderall were readily available and the only medications available to me were anti-psychotics.  SOOOO ANYWAY!  By my senior year in high school, I drank two and a half 12-cup pots of coffee each day by myself.  That's a lot of coffee!  This was in addition to the unmeasured Diet Coke and chocolate I consumed.

A true addict will "use" in any form.  That's me.  I will use caffeine in any form, in any state (meaning wet or dry, gel or powder, liquid or solid) temperature be damned!  Hot, cold or tepid are all fine with me.  I drink coffee, tea and diet cola products and prefer them artificially sweetened.  I drink coffee thick as mud or watered down and weak, black, loaded with cream and artificial sweetener(and sometimes booze), flavored up mochas and lattes, and just about any other way possible. I love coffee flavored food products and of course, chocolate.

The best coffee I ever had was at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia.  My preferred coffee stop is Starbucks, but any will do. I have a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf frequent flier card but alas, the closest one is in San Francisco.  I like the Dunkin Donuts coffee.  I will even drink instant, but I grind my own beans at home.

I don't consume nearly as much caffeine as I used to, but no matter how much I drink, it has lost it's ability to keep me awake.  I can drink a full pot of coffee and fall asleep easily.

Once an addict, always an addict

And now, I'm all out of random.