Mmmm . . . Coffee

I took this photo on my dining room table back in, oh, I think it was 2004.  At the time, I had an online diary on another site, and I built my template design around the coffee theme.  I played with the photo in Photo Shop and came up with 16 different versions of the photo.  Some of them were particularly fun.

As you may have guessed, I love my coffee.

I used to enjoy flavored coffees and grinding the beans myself, but I’ve gotten now where I just really like my Breakfast Blend better than any special flavor.  I never bought a new coffee grinder after I went gluten free, and I haven’t really missed it.

I love coffee for its ability to help fight migraines.  I love it for its comforting aspects.  I love coffee for the way it can temporarily quiet the cacophony of thoughts that are so often present in my head.

Someone told me recently that it’s pretty common for people with ADD to find coffee calming.  I hadn’t thought of it before, but coffee does calm me down.  I don’t recall a time in my life when I would say I actually felt any increase in physical energy from caffeine or sugar or any of those things that give people energy boosts.  What caffeine usually does for me (although it can aggravate palpations if I’m already having them and I drink too much caffeine) is quiet my thoughts and help me relax and focus.  Not “relax” in a falling-asleep sort of way (although I did fall asleep right after I drank my first cup of coffee as a kid; that’s been a humorous memory ever since), but more like “relax” in a “stop ruminating and take a breath” sort of way.  And while it doesn’t fix all of my focus problems, it does help, most of the time.

But for those who do get the energy boost or jitters from coffee, you may find humor in these:

I also found this interesting article about a study that showed that caffeine helps to improve memory (something also mentioned in the blog post I linked to, above, about coffee and ADD/ADHD, as well as several other health benefits) and might actually help to reverse symptoms of Alzeheimer’s.

The research, published online in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, found that for mice with the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease, consuming the caffeine-spiked drinking water resulted in a 50 percent reduction in the levels of a protein in the brain that is a key aspect of the disease, according to an article in The Mirror.

In a partial old entry rerun, this is part of an entry from November of 2004, from my old diary, about two dreams I’d had.  I came across it last week while I was looking for something else, and it cracked me up.  I’d forgotten about it.  The first dream sort of relates to the coffee theme:

I had a couple weird dreams last night. First, I was at work and was making a cup of coffee and saw some worms in my coffee cup. On closer inspection, two of them were having sex. It was funny because they looked like tiny little people with slimy worm bodies and worm heads, and they were just going at it. I suggested to one of the guys that maybe we should keep them and see if they have worm-babies. Then the alarm went off and I hit the snooze button, and proceeded to have a dream about weevils in food. Weird. I have no earthly clue what that could mean psychologically. I’m not sure I’d want to know the significance of copulating worms in my coffee cup. Gives new meaning to the phrase, “I need my f-ing coffee!”

And that need for coffee brings us to humor about caffeine addiction:

Here is a cute cartoon, especially if you are a therpy client.

And finally, just for the awwww factor, I leave you with this . . .

Old Entry Reruns: The Nostalgia Room, Part One

I have some favorite old entries from my old online diary that I had before coming to WordPress, and I thought it might be fun to share some of them here, as “reruns”. . .

This one was originally posted on October 15, 2008.  I’ve made just a few minor changes for clarification.  It was published as one entry, but at over 2800 words, I thought it might be nicer to split it into a few entries.  This might also qualify as a Bliss List entry as well, since looking at some of these pictures and thinking of my old childhood toys does bring a smile to my face.

Part of me kinda hopes I’ll spur a little trend in blogland, of looking up photos of our favorite childhood toys and writing about them.  :-)

~   ~   ~

The Nostalgia Room
10/15/08
Part One

It all started with a Bewitched lunchbox.

A few years ago, a friend gave me a Bewitched lunchbox for my birthday (I’m a huge Bewitched fan).  I got the idea, since my office room was never decorated in a “theme” (I’m big on themes for each room), to decorate it in a “Classic TV” theme.  I envisioned TV posters and memorabilia from my favorite classic TV shows, and decided to go with the 1950’s and 1960’s (minus most of the “groovy psychedelic” stuff) as my time frame, while still debating about including just a little bit of the 1970’s so that I could include other favorite shows like Three’s Company.

I started thinking it would be cool if I could find some curtains with one of the patterns that was popular in the 60’s (if you follow that link, I like the blue “galaxy” design best), and maybe one of those star wall clocks, and some knick-knacks from the time frame, maybe frame some magazine ads or old TV Guide covers.  (I used to collect TV Guides as a kid, and really regret getting rid of them when I was a teenager and thought they took up too much space – people are selling them on eBay and some of them go for not-bad money.  I’ve even been watching a couple of them from the time-frame of my novel series (late 1980’s to mid 1990’s), to use for reference to TV programming in some scenes.)  I envisioned finding an old TV cabinet and asking my dad if he could put a regular TV inside it to make it look like the old type.  I’d like to find an old metal desk, like you see on the TV shows from the ’60’s (that taupe color, or did they call it putty?), or maybe one of those retro-looking rolltop computer desks to hide the computer when I’m not using it.  Depending on what items I finally decide on and how much space I have to work with based on that, maybe I could find a nice side/easy chair with one of those kidney-shaped end tables and a lamp that looks like it’s from the right time period.

This could take years to do, of course, because money is the biggest issue, but it could be a fun hobby-project-in-progress over those years.

Sister gave me a photo frame she found at a thrift shop.  It’s decorated like a 50’s diner, and I got to thinking how cool it would be if I could find an ice-cream table and chairs to put in the corner, and decorate the corner like a diner.  Sort of “Route 66″.  Maybe a Coca-Cola sign, one of the old-fashioned napkin holders, and maybe one of those AM/FM radios that are made to look like the old restaurant-booth juke boxes.  Or instead of an ice-cream table, maybe I could find a small table with one of those Formica tops with that boomerang design.  That would go better with the restaurant-booth look.

I don’t feel a big need for things in the room to be authentic antiques from the actual time period; I can’t afford that anyway, and the whole point is just to create that feeling that I get when I watch my favorite old shows.  As much as I love technology and many other aspects of living in this time (equality, access to information, etc.), I also feel such a tug in my heart for those simpler times.  Maybe it’s because I was a kid in the ’60’s and ’70’s (and a sheltered kid at that), but it just seems that life was so much more innocent then.  (Strangers were nicer to each other and didn’t have the overblown sense of entitlement at the expense of everyone else that I see so often now.  Customer Service meant talking to real people.  Children weren’t bombarded with TV shows and ads with overtly sexual messages.  Things like that.)  I guess for every step forward, there has to be a letting-go of something else.  But that is maybe a topic for another entry, some other day.

So here and there, I’ve been collecting some knick-knack items I’ve found inexpensively on eBay over the last year or so.  Once I decided for sure that I wanted to go ahead and include a touch of the ’70’s too, I thought about what a shame it is that I don’t have my old Barbie dolls anymore.  (Long story short: in a moment of frustration and caving in to outside pressure back in 1991, I got rid of a lot of things that I wish I hadn’t.)  I thought that if I still had my old dolls, I could make a little arrangement of them on a shelf, dressed in their 1970’s clothes.  I began to search eBay for some of the Barbie dolls I had as a kid, and that was when it finally dawned on me that in creating this “theme room”, I was really attempting to recreate my childhood.  That’s a big realization.

Now, over the years, since I got rid of my stuff, I had several dreams about these dolls.  In the dreams, I always found myself back in the house where we lived during the years I played with my Barbie dolls, and I would always go and look in my bedroom closet, and there they would be!  I’d be so happy to have them back, like old friends, only to wake up and realize I was dreaming.  I know this sounds kind of nuts for a woman in her 40’s to be reminiscing to this degree about childhood toys – even dreaming about them – but I think now that it has to do with something from those years that I’m trying to recreate and process.  That’s another entry for another time (or not), but since I found all these pictures on eBay and decided to write this diary entry (a year or so ago – it’s taken me awhile to be ready to actually write it), I haven’t had one of those dreams.  It seems that doing all that searching and poring over the pictures and having all those “Oh, yeah, I remember this-and-that . . .” moments was good for me.

Coming Soon . . . Part Two with Barbie Pictures!

See other Bliss List entries

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