Adage #12: Learn to make coffee so well you can do it in your sleep.

My wonderful co-worker and friend, Laura, gets annoyed with me when she tries to have a conversation in the morning with me, but I am too tired to know what's going on. After waking up for 3 years before 6am (to work at a coffee place, nonetheless), one would think I could handle being fully aware of my surroundings by 8:30am, but this is not the case.

Yesterday I came into the office and after unsuccessfully trying to hold a normal conversation with Laura, she considerately suggested that I should make some coffee before I attempted to talk with her again. I then spent 15 minutes in the kitchen trying to figure out how much coffee to make. Here is the internal conversation I had with myself:

"Where is the measuring spoon?"

This took me approximately 3 minutes to locate. Mind you, you can hardly fit two people in this kitchen, so there were not a whole lot of places for the measuring spoon to be.

"Now how many tablespoons of coffee do I put per cup of water?"

"If I put 6 tablespoons, then I need 3 cups of water..."

"But wait, 3 cups of water will make 3 cups of coffee and that won't even fill up my mug!"

At this point, my mind thinks 3 cups = 3 ounces.

"So if I put 10 tablespoons of coffee in the filter, I will need 5 cups of water which will equal 5 ounces of coffee and that's less than a cup of coffee which is 8 ounces."

I had this part of the conversation for a couple of minutes, using different tablespoon amounts to try and end up with a full cup of coffee.

"How in the world do people successfully make this stuff everyday! You have to use so much coffee to get one little mug of it. 12 tablespoons is a lot to get just 6 ounces of coffee. How can this be right!?"

"Ugh, I don't know!"

At this point, I preceed to stop counting any sort of measurement and just dump coffee and water into the coffee pot.

After 15 mintues in the kitchen, I emerge:

Laura: "So, you were in there for a while."

Me: "I know, wasn't I!? I had a really rough time making coffee this morning."

Laura: "Did you figure it out?"

Me: "I'm not really sure, we'll find out when it's done."