I’ll spare the deepest details, but I’ve been having a heckuvatime with my health lately. As such, there are a couple things on hold at the moment:
1) Running. In my current state, it ain’t gonna happen.
2) Coffee. Sigh. Well, it’s been two weeks without, so it’s fairly a moot point now.
3) Spicy food. [...]

We’re all on the mend here after a few days of moderate (though merely annoying) head-colds, one of the souvenirs we brought back from Portland. (Alice will likely feel guilty ’cause I wrote that, but after her generous hospitality the least we could do is take some germs off her hands.) As far as [...]

December 10
I was listening to a writing podcast the other day and they were talking about doing character development through the use of whitespace. That is to say, by filling in the spaces around a character, one is left with a vacant spot where the character would fit. At first I thought that [...]

It’s been a month worth of upgrading. Upgrades are cool. Usually, it just means taking something you already have and improving, replacing, or appending it to make it better. My highlights of this pleasant process include:

:: I put my snow tires on the car yesterday and just this morning had the two-year old beast [...]

December 12
One of those takeaways from the whole “not drinking coffee” for fifty days thing was the abundance of tea I acquired while a practicing abstainer. I decided to go whole hog for the ritual, and drank mostly — when possible — from a selection of loose teas. My favorites included:
1) Monk’s Blend [...]

Why? Because I said so. With class wrapping up in a little less than a week, and the holiday season grinding things to a slow crawl as soon as this next few days is over, I’m going to have (hopefully) a little extra time on my hands.
So. Every day, [...]

I’ve become something of a tea connoisseur, juggling a small collection of loose-leaf blends in the drawer of my desk at work. Forty days without coffee, while not nearly a milestone, is definitely a point of reflection: the steadfast test came this weekend as I brewed a fresh, fragrant pot each morning for company, [...]

The justification has begun.
I suppose it is one of those “quitting” things. The first week is easy. The burden is a physical one. A headache here, a slump there, a bit of fatigue when dawn rolls by the window and it just doesn’t seem that possible to get showered, fed, and to [...]

This isn’t a journal about some mystic journey to caffeine free-ness. But I would like to note that I’ve been cold turkey on the coffee for a full five days now. That’s all. Not much commentary this soon out of the gate. Too bad.

Here’s the deal: In celebration of this weekend’s anticipated HOT turkey, I’ve decided to go COLD turkey on the coffee for a while. Don’t ask why. It’s just one of those things that somehow I’ve decided would be good for me.
Caffeine is the most commonly used mood-altering drug in the world. Caffeine is [...]

Despite needing to break for a few hours to move my sister and subsequently feed my family, I cannot fully express how well the writing went yesterday.
I was up with the dog at 6:30. I should have been dismayed. I should have been frustrated. But my brain had been churning all night long, [...]

My little sis, Sharyl, bought me a coffee grinder for Christmas. As requested. And, as I told her just this past weekend, that at the current level of usage it might need to be an annual gift. Yes, it’s being well-used.
So, I’ve been sampling from the world of whole-bean coffee lately. Not only does [...]