Coffee, Anyone?

My husband and I drink coffee every morning when we get up. The only exception to that rule is if we sleep really late on the weekends, but even then it’s rare that we don't drink it whenever we get up. He usually makes it on the weekends but I somehow got stuck with being the official coffee maker during the week. I always prepare it the night before and set the timer for it to brew before we get up in the morning. Our morning ritual consists of us drinking our coffee while watching the local news in between waking the kids for school and then getting ourselves ready.

Last night, as I was doing my "before bedtime routine", I decided that I'd just skip coffee today knowing that my husband had taken the day off from work and would be sleeping late today. I thought I'd take full advantage of the fact that he wouldn’t be nudging me to get up if I hit snooze two or three times and sleep a little later than normal. So, I crawled out of bed this morning half asleep and rushed around like a mad woman trying to get out of here on time, semi-regretting my decision to pass on the coffee.

It was a brutal morning at work without my normal dose of caffeine to keep me going. I could hardly keep from nodding off right there at my desk. I work for a very small company and we don't even have coffee at work. Can you believe that? It’s the only place I’ve ever worked where there's not coffee brewing all day long or it wouldn’t have been a big deal. We do have a coffee shop across the street that comes in handy for times like these, but it was raining today and I just wasn't willing to venture out into the rain so I just toughed it out.

As I was leaving for lunch today I called my husband to check on the status of his day and during our conversation I mentioned how tired I'd been all morning since I'd chosen to skip my morning coffee. He got very upset and asked what I meant by that so I explained myself. He went on to tell me that he’d gotten up and poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot and heated it up in the microwave. Our coffee pot sits in an out of the way spot on the counter and is sort of "out of sight, out of mind". I'm usually the only one in the house who empties and/or washes it, so it's not unusual for it to sit there with a little bit of leftover coffee in it until it's time to make the next pot. We were discussing how old the coffee must've been as he tried not to puke during our conversation. He said he had looked it over and even smelled it before pouring himself a cup and that he really thought it was leftover from earlier this morning. We decided it must've been from yesterday and he was totally grossed out to think that he'd enjoyed a cup of twenty-four-hour old coffee. We both laughed, in between him gagging and hung up. I thought about it some more after that and just had to call him back after I specifically remembered that this was an unusual weekend for us because we didn't have coffee on Saturday or Sunday. He'd actually enjoyed a cup of Friday’s coffee on this Monday morning! Upon hearing this news he suddenly felt sick and asked me to go look inside at the filter to see if there was any mold growing on the coffee grounds. (And no, there wasn't!)

I guess if I were a really good wife I would've just let him keep thinking it was only twenty-four-hour old coffee rather than seventy-two-hour old coffee. Not!