Mas cafe, senor?

I've been trying to wean myself off of Diet Coke lately. I'm okay with having a few a week, but I'd like to stop making it a daily thing. At my worst I never really drank more than 3-4, which when compared to some, is not that many. Courtney echoed these sentiments the other day when she said she was tired of drinking liquid cancer. Given my other indulgences, I am inclined to agree.

So I picked up this:


If I'm not going to get to enjoy a supermodel's lunch anymore, then I'm damn sure going to drink my coffee in a cute way. Major upside to this rather overpriced thermos? It matches nearly everything I wear.

But that thermos only holds a couple cups of coffee, and clearly I will need more caffeine than that.

So I bought this:

Bodum French Press

I also bought two heavy lourdes of coarse ground coffee, but it doesn't look interesting.

Let me just say, the French Press, or cafetiere, is an amazing invention. It is very intuitive for tea drinkers, or people who want to distill every last bit of stimulant from their java. A word of caution, however: if you eat a diet high in cholesterol then you probably aren't reading this blog the cafetiere is not for you. Paper-filtered coffee pots protect you from cafestol, a substance which dramatically increases cholesterol. I primarily eat kashi and products derived from goats though, so I think I'll probably be okay.

Nowadays, I drink about 6 cups of coffee a day. This is reasonable because of the fact that I sleep only 4 hours each night (which is not, in and of itself, reasonable, I realize), but I do wonder if I'm not just trading one vice for another.

The biggest advantage to drinking a lot of coffee (4+ cups) is a substantially reduced risk of bladder stones. This is the yes. It may also end up being more cost-effective, if not cheaper, in the long run. It has the unfortunate side-effect of increasing my consumption of cigarettes, crosswords and Sudoku, but that is a price I am willing to pay. Trembling like a coked-up Michael J. Fox is not; but some things you can't avoid.