Jacobs Coffee Quotes

Come on, don't you ever stop and smell the coffee?

Jacob made me feel safe. He was like a living lullaby. A softly spoken word. The smell of coffee and toast in the morning or a cozy fleece blanket. The rain pattering on the roof on a day where you don’t have to go anywhere or do anything.

Wait!" What?" I lowered my cup hastily, wondering if maybe there was a stray hair, or worse, a newly boiled bug inside my cup. You got to smell it first. It's the proper way to cup coffee." Cup coffee?" Taste it." What? Are you the coffee police or something?

You have five minutes to call someone, anyone, I don't care who, and order me the finest blend of coffee that rat hole town has, and a dozen beers. If it's not sitting on this table..." a slender finger pointed furiously at the table in question,"... in one hour, you die" - Faith telling Jacob

She snorted. I haven´t negotiated near enough where you are concerned, Jacob. If I had, I wouldn´t have suffered with terminal horniness for the past six years. I get my coffee, you get the sex. No limits allowed. No crying foul if you can´t keep up. How much coffee can you drink? he asked her suspiciously. Faith made certain her smile was innocent and non-threatening. The question is, Jacob, how often can you fuck?

And I'll have you know that if you hurt my son again, if he so much as sighs sadly over his coffee, I will hire a man, a Russian, probably, to hunt you down and rip all that shiny black hair from your head, then break your skinny arms and legs, and set you on fire, and then put you out with a hammer. And should there be children from your beastly rutting, I shall have the Russian man cut them to tiny pieces and feed them to Madame Jacob's dog. because, although he may be only a worthless, simpleminded, libertine artist, Lucien is my favorite, and I will not have him hurt. Do you understand?

Know that...there's plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just...help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don't panic. And there's coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks and juice in the kitchen, and plenty of ice in the freezer so...let me know if you have any questions with that.' And lastly, since I have you all here in one place, I have something to share with you. Along the garden ways just now...I too heard the flowers speak. They told me that our family garden has all but turned to sand. I want you to know I've watered and nurtured this square of earth for nearly twenty years, and waited on my knees each spring for these gentle bulbs to rise, reborn. But want does not bring such breath to life. Only love does. The plain, old-fashioned kind. In our family garden my husband is of the genus Narcissus , which includes daffodils and jonquils and a host of other ornamental flowers. There is, in such a genus of man, a pervasive and well-known pattern of grandiosity and egocentrism that feeds off this very kind of evening, this type of glitzy generosity. People of this ilk are very exciting to be around. I have never met anyone with as many friends as my husband. He made two last night at Carvel. I'm not kidding. Where are you two? Hi. Hi, again. Welcome. My husband is a good man, isn't he? He is. But in keeping with his genus, he is also absurdly preoccupied with his own importance, and in staying loyal to this, he can be boastful and unkind and condescending and has an insatiable hunger to be seen as infallible. Underlying all of the constant campaigning needed to uphold this position is a profound vulnerability that lies at the very core of his psyche. Such is the narcissist who must mask his fears of inadequacy by ensuring that he is perceived to be a unique and brilliant stone. In his offspring he finds the grave limits he cannot admit in himself. And he will stop at nothing to make certain that his child continually tries to correct these flaws. In actuality, the child may be exceedingly intelligent, but has so fully developed feelings of ineptitude that he is incapable of believing in his own possibilities. The child's innate sense of self is in great jeopardy when this level of false labeling is accepted. In the end the narcissist must compensate for this core vulnerability he carries and as a result an overestimation of his own importance arises. So it feeds itself, cyclically. And, when in the course of life they realize that their views are not shared or thier expectations are not met, the most common reaction is to become enraged. The rage covers the fear associated with the vulnerable self, but it is nearly impossible for others to see this, and as a result, the very recognition they so crave is most often out of reach. It's been eighteen years that I've lived in service to this mindset. And it's been devastating for me to realize that my efforts to rise to these standards and demands and preposterous requests for perfection have ultimately done nothing but disappoint my husband. Put a person like this with four developing children and you're gonna need more than love poems and ice sculpture to stay afloat. Trust me. So. So, we're done here.

She could see Albert standing at the door, hiding the bakery box behind him with his mischievous smile. When he revealed them, she had hugged him tight. The landlady had brought some expresso and the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs had enjoyed their cheesecake tarts in front of the little fireplace with fine Italian coffee. Even so long after Albert’s death, remembering that scene still brought her comfort.

Her brother's desk was austere, save for a small photo of Lewis and a coffee mug featuring a math geek's coy declaration of love: √-1 <3 μ.

Vienna didn’t invent the coffeehouse. The world’s first sprang up in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1554, the first Western European one nearly a century later when an enterprising young man named Jacob opened a shop in Oxford, England, that served the “bitter black beverage.” From the outset, coffee was considered dangerous. It was known as the “revolutionary drink,

Compounding Julia’s irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam’s friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as their friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn’t muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.

One final word of caution about caffeine: make sure your children don’t drink caffeinated beverages in the afternoon. When a child drinks a can of cola, the caffeine intake is comparable to four cups of coffee for an adult.

Motion is the enduring principle of Eastern Europe. Motion of people, motion of faiths, motion of ideas. This is the reason why population maps of Eastern Europe, especially old ones, look so disorderly, like slabs of marbled beef or a cup of coffee before the cream has settled. The migrations leading to the creation of Western European nations happened in the very distant past. In Eastern Europe, they never stopped. Long after the Visigoths and Franks, Saxons and Jutes of the West were a distant memory, nomadic Cumans and Pechenegs were still arriving from the steppes. Tatars were still conducting great slave raids in the territory around Lviv in Mozart's day, and only ceased when Catherine the Great finally put a stop to them.

He needed to get Mollie out from under that woman’s roof as soon as possible. The most desirable option being moving her into the clinic as his wife. But she deserved a proper courtship, not some rushed affair that would lend itself to whispers behind closed doors. Of course, if he were openly courting her, the hours they spent together in the clinic or on house calls could raise eyebrows as well. Jacob smacked the trunk of one of the young pines that stood outside his clinic with enough force to shake needles loose. Shoot, maybe he should just abduct her and elope. A smile finally curved his lips as he imagined Mollie’s response to that idea. She’d probably dose his coffee with castor oil for a week if he suggested such a thing.

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well. The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.

We live in the world, Jacob thought. That thought always seemed to insert itself, usually in opposition to the word ideally. Ideally, we would make sandwiches at homeless shelters every weekend, and learn instruments late in life, and stop thinking about the middle of life as late in life, and use some mental resource other than Google, and some physical resource other than Amazon, and permanently retire mac and cheese, and give at least a quarter of the time and attention to aging relatives that they deserve, and never put a child in front of a screen. But we live in the world, and in the world there’s soccer practice, and speech therapy, and grocery shopping, and homework, and keeping the house respectably clean, and money, and moods, and fatigue, and also we’re only human, and humans not only need but deserve things like time with a coffee and the paper, and seeing friends, and taking breathers, so as nice as that idea is, there’s just no way we can make it happen. Ought to, but can’t.

Mrs. Indianapolis was in town again. She looked like a can of Sprite in her green and yellow outfit. She always likes to come down to the front desk just to chat. It was 4:04 am and thankfully I was awake and at the front desk when she got off the elevator and walked towards me. 
 “Good morning, Jacob,” she said.
 “My name is Jarod,” I replied.
 “When did you change your name?” “I was born Jarod, and I’ll probably die. Maybe.”
 “You must be new here. You look like a guy named Jacob that used to work at the front desk.”
 “Nope, I’m not new. And there’s no Jacob that’s worked the front desk, nor anybody who looks or looked like me. How can I assist you, Mrs. Indianapolis?”
 “I’d like to inform you that the pool is emitting a certain odor.”
 “What sort of odor?”
 “Bleach.”
 “Ah, that’s what we like to call chlorine. It’s the latest craze in the sanitation of public pools. Between you and me, though, I think it’s just a fad.”
 “Don’t get sassy with me, young man. I know what chlorine is. I expect a clean pool when I go swimming. But what I don’t expect is enough bleach to get the grass stain out of a shirt the size of Kentucky.”
 “That’s not our policy, ma’am. We only use about as much chlorine as it would take to remove a coffee stain the size of Seattle from a light gray shirt the size of Washington.” “Jerry, I don’t usually give advice to underlings, but I’m feeling charitable tonight. So I’ll tell you that if you want to get ahead in life, you have to know when to talk and when not to talk. And for a guy like you, it’d be a good idea if you decided not to talk all the time. Or even better, not to talk at all.”
 “Some people say some people talk too much, and some people, the second some people, say the first some people talk to much and think too little. Who is first and who is second in this case? Well, the customer—that’s you, lady—always comes first.”
 “There you go again with the talking. I’d rather talk to a robot than to you.”
 “If you’d rather talk to a robot, why don’t you just find your husband? He’s got all the personality and charm of a circuit board. Forgive me, I didn’t mean that.”
 “I should hope not!”
 “What I meant to say was fried circuit board. It’d be quite absurd to equate your husband’s banter to a functioning circuit board.”
 “I’m going to have a talk to your manager about your poor guest service.”
 “Go ahead. Tell him that Jerry was rude and see what he says. And by the way, the laundry room is off limits when no lifeguard is on duty.

Founded in 2011, ToyTalk already produces popular animated conversational apps — among them the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo — that encourage young children to engage in complex dialogue with a menagerie of make-believe characters. Now the company’s technology, originally designed for two-dimensional characters on-screen, is poised to power tangible playthings that children hold in their hands. This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses. “She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.” [Video: Hello Barbie is World's First Interactive Barbie Doll Watch on YouTube.] It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.

The moment when it crystallized for me was in early 1999. Due to the vicissitudes of my freelancing schedule, I ended up playing Holst’s The Planets three times with three different orchestras in a six-month period. Maybe you know that piece. There are recycled versions of it in everything John Williams swiped for the Star Wars movies and everything bombastic and shallow you’ve ever been annoyed by in every action movie of the last twenty years, plus the horrible Phrygian raised fourth that was everywhere in early twentieth-century English classical music (I’m talking to you, Gordon Jacob, and you, Edward Elgar). The Planets, along with Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, had been grating on me more and more with each passing year of being a musician. Playing The Planets with three orchestras within a year, this time as clarinet two in the Modesto Symphony, made me realize that if I played it one more time, I would go on a rampage and hurt people with my clarinets. I needed a plan B, and coffee was all I could imagine.

The dark texts,” she whispered in horror, “he stole them.” “Where was it?” I asked as I scanned the paper in front of me. The same lettering that was on the front cover was also on the page. “Under the table,” she responded with a shake of her head. “This book holds some of the darkest magic ever known, and that idiot left it sitting on the fucking coffee table.” “Some coffee table.” I laughed humorlessly as Ariette slammed the book shut with a heavy sigh.

The first shot has played itself out on the screen. . . . To linger on it after our actor has left the scene is to leave our viewer with “cold coffee.” . . . If the viewer is not confused or disappointed, he will simply be bored. It has been many years since a mere picture projected on the screen was considered amazing or amusing. Every part of a film must deliver its message, but the only message delivered by redundant frames of film is that the cutter was inept or too lazy to cut them off.

She was not prepared for Mallory to pull away before Rien thought the kiss was half finished, quickly nipping at Rien’s lower lip and then pressing a finger against it. And then it was dark eyes, brown and transparent as coffee, with green and amber flecks swimming under the surface of Mallory’s breath across her mouth.

The most expensive coffee comes from elephant feces.

In 1994, former Guns N Roses bassist, Duff McKagan, decided to invest $100,000 in local Seattle companies, including an expanding chain of coffee shops, a software company and an online book seller; Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon.

The first cause of death, Jacob now understands, is life. As long as you're alive, death is always a chance. A possibility just waiting to happen. Until it most certainly does.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

Finally I settled on something I can’t live without. My coffee. It seemed right for a couple of reasons. First, I do love my morning cup from my local café. I take it to go, no milk. I’m not a fanatic and my palate is unrefined, but I relish coffee’s bitter taste and the pleasant buzz it gives me—it’s my favorite narcotic, hands down. Second, coffee has a huge impact on our world. More than two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day around the globe. The coffee industry employs 125 million people internationally. Coffee is intertwined with politics, economics, and history. The Enlightenment was born in Europe’s coffeehouses.

A couple of days later, I’ve worked up the nerve to tell the barista about Project Gratitude. I asked her if she’d be willing to share with me a bit about what goes into making my coffee. She said she’d be happy to talk after her shift.

Chung served me my coffee—but who chose what type of coffee I drank? Who selected my daily blend from the tens of thousands of varieties across the globe? The answer to that takes me one step back on the chain to a man named Ed Kaufmann, head of buying at Joe Coffee Company, which now has nineteen stores in New York and Philadelphia. Ed agrees to meet me at the Joe Coffee Company headquarters in Chelsea.

I may not fully appreciate the subtleties, but on some level, I know that Ed’s wisdom in choosing the best beans benefits me. The very fact that Ed thinks so deeply about my coffee is part of the reason I don’t have to think about it at all. It’s a key reason gratitude is so difficult to maintain, and why it takes so much effort and intention: If something is done well for us, the process behind it is largely invisible.

The Cup Makers Thanks for Stopping the Coffee from Spilling on My Lap

The ratio in my cup is 1.2 percent crushed beans, 98.8 percent water. So if I’m going to thank everyone involved in my cup of coffee, I better thank those who provide the vast majority of the liquid.

Somewhere in that lake are the drops of water that, over the next several months, will travel down miles of tubes, get sprayed with chlorine, zapped with ultraviolet light, and eventually climb the pipes of Joe Coffee’s sink and land in my cup.

I take out my crumpled piece of loose-leaf paper, look at the Guarnizo family, and read: “Gracias por ustedes.” I continue, in my stumbling Spanish: “I now understand more about all the work that goes into making my morning cup of coffee, and I will not take it for granted again. “Thank you for picking the beans and washing them and drying them. “Your coffee has given me great happiness every morning, and helped give me the energy to write books and articles and take care of my kids. “From now on, I’ll think of you when I drink my morning coffee. And perhaps you will think of people like me in the United States, and the joy you give to us. And perhaps you will think of all the artists and architects and salespeople and engineers in New York who are inspired by what you produce.

The thankees listed are a diverse group. Some have contributions that are obvious (the barista and the farmers). Some are admittedly quite tangential (the folks who make the asphalt for the roads on which the coffee-carrying trucks travel). But my thesis is that the world is woven together by connections. So I wanted to be expansive in my thanks, not restrictive. These folks may be tangential, but they are also, oddly enough, crucial.

CHAPTER 1 THE BARISTA AND THE TASTER 1. The barista Chung Lee at my local Joe Coffee. 2. Ed Kaufmann, the head coffee buyer at Joe Coffee Company. 3. Jonathan Rubinstein, the founder of Joe Coffee Company. 4–5. Richard and Alice Rubinstein, Jonathan’s parents who invested in the very first Joe Coffee shop. 6–11. Other key Joe Coffee staff, including Tim Hinton, manager of my local Joe Coffee Company, and Frankie Tin, Brandon Wall, Doug Satzman, Will Hewes, and Jonathan’s sister, Gabrielle Rubinstein. 12–15. The employees of Mazzer coffee grinders, which ground my coffee beans, including Luca Maccatrozzo, Cristian Cipolotti, Luigi Mazzer, and Mattia Miatto. 16–19. Thunder Group, makers of the strainer used at Joe Coffee, including Michael Sklar, Brian Young, Takia Augustine, and Robert Huang. 20–22. The folks at Hario digital scale for coffee, including Shin Nemoto, Sakai Hario, and Tagawa Hario. 23–25. The workers at the Specialty Coffee Association, including Don Schoenholt, Spencer Turer, and Kim Elena Ionescu, who organize coffee conventions where Joe Coffee employees find new supplies. 26–29. Oxo kitchen tools, including Juan Escobar, John DeLamar, Eddy Viana, and Lynna Borden. 30–31. The developers of the coffee flavor chart, including Edward Chambers and Rhonda Miller,

which coffee tasters use to identify flavor.

32. Ed Kaufmann’s tasting teacher, Rob Stephen. 33–35. The manufacturers of the tasting spoon used by Joe Coffee, including Stephen Wright, Beatrice “Beattie” France, and Ryan May of the W. Wright Cutlery & Silverware company. 36–37. Pioneers of the cupping procedure used for tasting coffee Clarence Bickford and B.D. Balart. 38–40. Developers of the Q Grade test used in tasting coffee Jean Lenoir, David Guermonprez, and Eric Verdier. 41–42. The makers of the Mudjug spittoon used by Ed Kaufmann in tasting the coffee, including Darcy Compton and Garrett Celano.

161–164. Staples, which makes the calculator used at Joe Coffee to figure out my coffee’s pricing and inventory, including Jason Oliver, Lewis Tse, Josh Kindberg, and Brian Katz.

240–242. The folks at GrainPro bags, specialty plastic bags for shipping coffee, Jose Gomez, Joey Saligao, and Diego Lara Lavarreda.

333. Ernest Earl Lockhart, researcher who discovered people prefer coffee that’s been brewed between 194 and 205 ° F.

404–407. Researchers who show coffee has health benefits, such as delaying dementia, including Neal Freedman, Francesco Panza, Harris Lieberman, and Charles Reed.

543–546. Staff at Morgan, which makes the bodies for the trucks used in transporting coffee bags, Elton Mountz, Corby Stover, Ryan Shirk, and Frank Maldonado.

688–711. Shipping my coffee takes a huge number of folks, including the Hong Kong Express ship crew, which brings the coffee to the port, including officers, electricians, cooks, and engineers such as Ariel Agalla, John Ryan Consad, Generoso Caneja, Angelito Segundino, Cesar Escobal, Maurice Bajo, Christoph Heers, Günter Naborowski, Ansgar Lehmköster, Danilo Napoto, Pawel Sobolewski, Aivan Delgado, John Aumüller, Lasse Gawande, Uriel Lumanog, Juan Carlos Nirza, Jay Vee Cruz, Mac Lawrence Dadivas, Remar Locsin, Genadij Dubrow, Gabriel Yana, Rheinell Nolasco, Michael Nierra, and Yonger Chaux.

774–781. Caravela Coffee importers for Joe Coffee, who deal with customs and logistics, including Badi Bradley, Anthony Auger, Christy Wicker, Matt Kolb, James Gibbs, Daniel Bolivar, Lorena Falla, and Alejandro Cadena.

The coffee bags are loaded onto the pallets, and the pallets are in turn loaded onto trucks and boats.

I flash back to an article I read a few weeks ago. The idea was that, yes, three dollars for a cup of coffee is ridiculously high. Practically felonious. But if we paid American minimum wage to all the people on the chain, coffee would cost about $25 a cup.

But this I can tell you: I will not take my coffee lid for granted again.

But many others were more receptive, like the woman who helped create the coffee cup sleeve, the brown cardboard ring you slip onto your coffee cup to protect you from the heat.

I remind myself: Don’t forget the folks who make the hardhats that the miners wear when getting the iron that’s turned into steel to make the chainsaws the lumberjacks use to cut down the trees to get the wood pulp to make the cup that my coffee comes in. Deep breath. In Paleolithic times, my project would have been much easier. But with globalization—which I do think is a force for good, despite its many pitfalls—thanking everyone involved in my cup of coffee could be a lifetime job.

I’m really glad you never found any bugs or mice in your coffee. And thank you. You made my day. You put a smile on my face.

steel. The ships and trains and trucks that carry the beans are made of steel, as are the stop signs and bridges and docks on their routes. Steel is in coffee scoopers and roasting machines, refrigerators and spoons.

This is the place where the raw green coffee beans are shipped from around the world, cooked dark brown, and put into vans to deliver to the cafés. The facility is a cavernous space with brick walls, wood beams, forklifts, cardboard boxes, and an incongruous golden chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

Eric explains that each member of the team has his own method for schlepping the 152-pound burlap bags of coffee beans as they come off the trucks.

The Farmers Thanks for Growing My Coffee

I wouldn’t have known they were coffee trees; there are no beans visible. Instead, the trees are filled with little red or yellow fruits that look like grape tomatoes. The coffee cherries, they’re called. Hidden in each cherry is the bean that produces my morning drink.

seriously think I might have to thank every single human on earth,” I say. Julie looks skeptical. She points to the People magazine lying nearby on the radiator. “What about her? How did Beyoncé help make your coffee?” I pause for a minute, and then I come up with an answer. With enough research, I explain, I could probably get to Beyoncé. Maybe one of the engineers who made the plastic lining for my coffee cup listened to Beyoncé songs to motivate her while studying for her chemistry final. Maybe the guy who drove the warehouse truck blasted Beyoncé to stay alert. “That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think?” Julie says. “Yes and no,” I say. We are all so interconnected; it’s hard to know where to draw the line.

It’s millions of dead people too, like the guy who first forged steel, and the goatherd in ancient Ethiopia who noticed his goats started dancing after eating a particular plant, and decided to try the coffee beans himself. At least that’s the legend.

But writing is such a part of who you are, and I want you to have space here if you need it too. Maybe sometimes we could work here? I promise to keep the coffee hot and my keyboard quiet.

I’m a believer in capitalism—I think it’s the best way we’ve found so far to structure a society. But I don’t buy the laissez-faire idea. I think we need regulations. I’m in favor of a superego to control the market’s id. I’m in favor of long-range thinking to balance stockholders’ lust for immediate profits. I think we need infrastructure to help us get the pencil and coffee safely into our hands. And I think we also need high-level coordination to keep us from playing with lead-paint-coated toys, eating salmonella steaks, and baking ourselves into oblivion with overreliance on fossil fuels.

It was not altogether easy when one's daughters were too gifted, it really wasn't. Mrs. Lossius nodded in the direction of Harriet, who, well brought up and virtuous, was busy with the coffee kettle. "You can be glad, Mrs Pram, that your daughters are not gifted in any particular direction.

Damn it!” I rubbed my eyes. My head hurt from staring at the laptop screen the whole day. “I’ve got to put this down for a while.” “Yes, put it down. Social networking is for the anti-social, yes?,” Eat’em shut my laptop and stood on it as I slid it onto the cluttered coffee table. “Keystrokes are a sign of the solipsistic lonely sort. Self-imposed solitary confinement, yes! You can’t rip all them ones and twos from the screen, Jacob.

Ants are averse to coffee grounds.  So the next time you will replace your coffee on your coffee maker or percolator, remember to save those coffee grounds.  Put them near your door or on the window sills and you will never see ants in your house again!

You can’t do all the work, John,” said Sam. “Your heart can’t take it.” “Nonsense,” said Grandfather. “Oh, I see,” said Sam. “You feel guilty for leaving Jacob when he was little. So you’ll make up for it by working hard and dying. That will make things right again?” “More nonsense,” said Grandfather. “Want some more coffee? I made it.” Sam shook his head. “Stubborn,” he said. “Old fool.

It’s not really such a bad place,” she says, looking around the room. She’s moved on to dessert. “They know how to make a decent rice pudding.” My hand shakes a little when I pour creamer into her coffee. If I got on a plane tonight I could be in Rome in time for dinner tomorrow. Homemade pasta, fresh tomatoes and basil. Real Parmesan cheese, not the kind that comes in packets. And wine—maybe something I haven’t tasted before, a grape varietal I don’t yet know. It would be nothing like here. A break from this place. From Mom. I want to get home and e-mail Paul. I will be there. I am coming. I feel her eyes on me as I pack up my things. “You should dye your hair before you leave,” she says finally. “See if the salon can fit you in this week.” “That’s a good idea.” I kiss her goodbye. “I bet Hannah is gorgeous, she’ll look just like Emily did at that age. Beautiful, but not the brightest bulb. It’s good you’re going. You’ll have to send me pictures.” She surveys my face. I try to keep it blank, unreadable. “Use my brightening mask when you get home. It’ll clear up whatever’s happening on your chin.” “I will.” I shift my purse full of papers and snacks and bottled water from one shoulder to the other. “I love you, see you tomorrow.