Caffeinated Math

Last year, around this time, Braz gave me his old Keurig, having gotten a shiny new one for Christmas.

A Keurig, if you're not a coffee drinker or have been living under a rock for the last few years, is a single-serve coffee maker. There are some knockoff variants on the market, but the Keurig is pretty well accepted as the standard.

I drink a couple of cups of coffee⁽¹⁾ a day at work, but it's a bad idea for me to have caffeine in the evenings. But the Keurig is great for weekends, or days that I'm working from home. And I did eventually find decaf K-cups, too, for my evenings. I don't drink as much coffee in warm weather (I never really got into iced coffee) but now that we're back to winter, I've been enjoying my Keurig a lot⁽²⁾ lately. Especially for the last few weeks, because between school holidays and this cold I've had all this week, I've been working from home a fair amount.

Yesterday, I had to go to Target to restock my NyQuil⁽³⁾ supply, and while I was there, I needed to refresh my stock of decaf K-cups.

But then I looked at the little filter converter doohickey. Now, I've been saying for about six months that I should get one, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I know for a fact that it's a good $5 more expensive at Target than on, say, Amazon, but I just forget about it when I'm on Amazon. So I went ahead and just bought the dang thing, and two bags of ground coffee.

Then I came home and made coffee, and it was fine. Now, just out of curiosity, let's do the math. A box of 12 of my grocery store's generic-brand K-cups costs about $7, $6 if I get a coupon, so let's say about 50 center a cup. That's not the cheapest over-the-counter cups you can get -- I bought a box of 80 cups from Sam's Club for $37, which is only 46 cents a cup, but they don't sell decaf that way, so it took me like eight months of weekends to get through them all, and I had to find a place to store them in the meantime. Poking around on Amazon does not improve that price, but I only poked for about a minute, so just to make the math easy, let's say I managed to get the cost of a K-cup down to 40 cents.

A 12-oz bag of pre-ground coffee beans, at Target, costs as little as $7, but let's say I'm going to get a more expensive variety and take it up to $10.⁽⁴⁾ Out of curiosity, I weighed my coffee before I put it into the machine this morning, and it came up at 10 grams. The K-cup box I still have says each cup is 9.5 grams of coffee, so that's about right. Twelve ounces is 340 grams, so a bag of coffee makes 34 cups. Even if we knock off one cup's worth of coffee for measuring differential, that's 33 cups of coffee at about 30 cents each.

So it's 10-15 cents cheaper, per cup, to use the filter and pre-ground coffee. Which doesn't seem like all that much, except that there are some other, nonmonetary, benefits:
- One 12-oz bag of coffee takes up approximately the same space as a 12-count box of K-cups. I can fit 66 cups' worth of coffee in my cabinet where previously I could only fit 24, tripling the space's effectiveness.
- The filter is more environmentally friendly, since the trash generated is merely coffee grounds instead of coffee grounds and a plastic-and-foil cup.⁽⁵⁾
- I can buy preground decaf coffee in a wider variety of flavors. Or, I should say, a variety, since K-cup decaf is pretty much only available in one flavor: coffee.⁽⁶⁾

So the filter pays itself somewhere between 120-180 cups of coffee. (Less, actually, if I keep buying cheaper ground coffee.) Assuming an average of one cup a day -- not unreasonable, since I'm only using the Keurig in the evenings on weeknights, and not every weeknight, but I do sometimes have multiple cups on weekends -- then the filter pays for itself in 4-6 months. (It would've been 3-4 months if I'd bought it on Amazon.)

Will the filter's mesh hold out for a whole six months or longer? We'll see.

Whew, that was a lot of work. Now I need a cup of coffee...

***

(1) Terminology: Strictly speaking, a "cup" of coffee is 6 ounces, but when I say "cup of coffee", I mean "mug of coffee", and when I say "mug", I mean "one of my enormous 16-20 ounce megamugs."
(2) "A lot" is relative, mind you -- I discovered about two months ago that if I have more than two mugs of coffee in the space of about six to eight hours, I get some pretty bad heartburn. Still, I'm averaging 32-60 ounces of coffee a day, which seems like a fair amount to me.
(3) Cue about 95% of readers singing the Dennis Leary song: "We love you, you giant fucking Q!"
(4) You can go higher than this, of course, but let's face it -- the $7 bag of coffee is probably about the same quality as the K-cups I was buying, so rounding up to $10 is being generous to the K-cups.
(5) It's possible, though I think unlikely, that the bag the beans come in is approximately the same amount of plastic-and-foil as a 12-count box of K-cups, but it's certainly less than 33 K-cups.
(6) Yes, I know you can get syrups to put in plain coffee. But I'll note that adds to the cost and also note that sugar-free coffee syrup is not available in a wide variety of flavors.

News and Such?

What's with the exhaustion lately, dammit? I went to bed at 9:30 Tuesday night, and at 10:30 last night, and I still feel like I want to crawl back under the covers for a half-day or so.

On the other hand, I feel like I've been weirdly busy. Aside from work stuff, I've gone through edits on a story that's coming out at the end of this month (squee! that never gets old!) and gently poked two editors for news on other stories. (I know that's a no-no, but it's been over 3 months since I heard from either of them. I thought a gentle request for information was not entirely out of line.) I've edited a short novel (a really good one, too, which is always awesome!) and written a couple of scenes in a couple of my own projects.

I've made plans for lunch tomorrow, and talked to Penny about attending a gallery show and contest that my brother is in this weekend. (We've agreed she'll bring a book to read, in case she gets bored before it's over.)

I've drunk surprisingly little coffee, and chewed a slightly ridiculous amount of gum. (Soon, I will be out of gum, and then it will be time to kick ass, I suppose.) I've made mini-pizzas and sausage chowder and baked chicken.

The frog and dragon game obsessions continue, slightly abated but by no means extinguished.

Tonight will be TV night -- we need to watch Castle from Monday and Big Bang Theory as well.

And that's... about it, I guess.

I'm leaning strongly toward taking tomorrow off, so I'll see y'all on Monday! Have a great weekend!

Jury's Out

Just as I was pulling into a parking space at work this morning, the man in the office down the hall came out of the building. I got out of the car as he pulled level with me, and he said, "There's no coffee in the building. I'm going over to Starbuck's -- want anything?"

I do not function at work without my morning coffee, so I hopped back in the car and followed the guy over to the nearby Starbuck's, where I discovered that sometime in the last few months (I don't go to Starbuck's often) they've completely remodeled, and also that they've introduced a new, mild blonde roast, which matches most other companies' medium roast and completely unhinges my complaint that Starbuck's coffee always tastes burnt (for no purpose, even, as a quick search will confirm that a longer, darker roast does not increase the amount of caffeine the bean releases).

I considered caving to the temptation of the pastry display, but the longer I stood in front of it waiting for my turn to pay, the less appetizing they looked, so in the end, I just got the cup of coffee. So I guess that's a win.

I did cave to the temptation of the Free App of the Week (which is something else that I didn't really know about, wherein you can snag a code each week to get a free app from the iTunes store) because the app this week happens to be Bejeweled, which is a great game that's easy enough for the kids to play. Which, combined with this blonde roast (which I'm sipping as I type this and is actually quite yummy) may result in  making a weekly Starbuck's run just to check out the week's offering.

So I'm not entirely certain if this counts as a good start to the day or a worrisome one. Whichever, I expect it'll be interesting.

Rock On

Isn't today almost over yet? I'm ready for it to be tonight -- the ultimate geekrock concert: Paul and Storm opening for Jonathan Coulton?! Too awesome for words, can't wait. And this time, I will buy a t-shirt or something. Since this is a venue with seats, I'll take my "real" camera along (as opposed to just using the blah camera built into the phone) so hopefully I'll get some good shots.

I'm obsessing slightly over what to wear, because I really want to wear these adorable black-and-purple striped tights I've got, but weirdly, despite half my wardrobe being purple right now, none of it is a shade of purple that goes with the purple of the tights. So I'm pondering my options, including the option of stopping at Target on the way back from getting my allergy shots this morning and finding something.

But before I can really get excited about going to the concert, I have to put together a report, review a few documents, make a menu and carb list for my parents to use for Penny tonight, come up with next week's dinner menu and shopping list, start a project data collection spreadsheet, invent my professional goals for the year, and host a two-hour teleconference.

Oh, and figure out why, when I got to work this morning, my computer was spontaneously rebooting itself over and over and over again, and brace for it to barf its hard drive all over the desk.

And before I get started on any of that?

I need coffee.

Denning

It is a grey, dark, rainy day. The kind of day where I don't mind so much having to go to work. The kind of day where I don't mind that my office at work has no windows. In fact, the temptation to mostly close my door and den up is pretty strong.

I have three candles burning on the side of my desk, and they smell like apples and pumpkin and cinnamon. Like fall. My space heater is doing its best to keep my little office warm, and in a little while, I'll go get a big mug of vanilla coffee, and that smell will mix with the apple and pumpkin and cinnamon, and I'll nurse it all morning. And when it's gone, I'll have orange spice tea.

There's still work to do. The proposal effort is still going. But the urgency for my part of it has relaxed, for now. I'll probably still have to come in for at least one day this weekend, but I'm not thinking about that, right now. I spent yesterday getting caught up on a bunch of other tasks, and I'm down to just a handful of things to do, today. And they're not things I dread -- they're tasks that might actually help some people, tasks that will provide me with a little bit of challenge, that will exercise talents I don't get to use nearly often enough. I'm even looking forward to them, a little bit.

There are worse ways to spend a dreary dark rainy day than with satisfying work and pleasant smells and tastes and the flicker of candlelight on the periphery.

I am... content.

Overflow

I'm the first one into the office this morning, so while my computer was booting up, I wandered down to the kitchen to make the coffee.

I turned on the plate, filled the pot with water, and left it in the sink while I got out the filter and coffee-pack. Filter into its box, open up the pack and dump the coffee in, put the box on its rack.

I picked up the pot and was just about to open the water-intake when the coffee machine... sputtered. And hissed.

As if it was heating up some water.

I looked at the pot in my hand, and then, out of curiosity, stuck the empty decaf pot on the plate.

It's a good thing, too, because a few seconds later, coffee started to come out of the drip. Someone had pre-filled the machine with water before turning it off, on Friday. And if I hadn't happened to turn on the plate before doing the rest of the prep-work, it wouldn't have sputtered until I'd already poured in a second pot's worth of water. Which would then have overflowed the pot and made a huge mess in the kitchen.

I could be annoyed about whoever prefilled the machine. It's a dumb thing to do unless you are 100% certain you're going to be the next one to turn the machine on.

But I'm in a good mood this morning, so instead, I'm choosing to feel good about having averted a mess. (We've had this happen before. This is exactly why I turn on the plate before I do everything else.)

---

Mother's Day was... okay, I guess. I had cinnamon rolls for breakfast, and Matt got me a couple of DVDs that I was excited about.

But Alex spent the day kind of fussy, so I didn't get to sleep in as much as I wanted to, and we spent the day trading him back and forth and trying to lull him into a nap. And Penny had more energy than she knew what to do with, which translated to her being loud and not terribly well-behaved at the grocery store, and then into all kinds of attitude in the afternoon. Combine that with our frustration with Alex, and we wound up yelling way too much.

The dinner with my family was nice -- grilled chicken stuffed with goat cheese and herbs, and grilled marinated vegetables, and salad and rolls. Except for Alex being fussy, which meant Matt and I couldn't be at the table at the same time, and we pretty much had to run as soon as we were done eating.

We did linger long enough for a picture, though. I'd wanted several pictures, but Alex was just too cranky -- but he's coming up on five months old, and I still didn't have a picture of the whole family together. So we did that.



You can tell Alex is tired, and I think John's tripod was crooked, but at least we're all together.

When we got home, Alex was so exhausted and overwrought that it took him half an hour of screaming to get to sleep, and then Penny got in trouble again for attitude and went to bed sobbing. It wasn't the best end to the day I could have imagined.

But despite that, I'm in a decent mood this morning. I feel like I could accomplish something this week. You never know - it could happen!