My Thoughts About Coffee & Other Tidbits

Flash!  Watching the Today Show this a.m., I learned that consuming 6 cups of coffee a day is actually healthy. If I drank that much coffee, I would be walking on the ceiling. Eventually there will be another report that drinking coffee at that level will surely shorten your life.  The jury is not out, the jury keeps getting different evidence.

Just thinking back over my life, so many beliefs have been abandoned. For example, growing up in Orlando where swimming was always part of lives, I can remember my mother and father not permitting us to swim for at least one hour after eating.  If you would be so misguided as to jump into the pool prior to that, you would certainly drown with severe Charley Horses.

At picnics we never ate items with any mayonnaise or what was in our families pantry, Miracle Whip.  It was sure to be bad since in those days coolers were not in use.  General our picnic items were sliced bread and a jar of peanut butter. Fresh fruit which when finally eaten was bruised from being packed in the same paper bag as the jar of peanut butter.  Also running after eating was also forbidden.

Can you believe our obsession over bottle waters, power waters, vitamin enriched bottle water, naturally sweetened bottle water?  The assortment of bottles, labels and amounts of bottle waters.  When we were thirsty as children, we would just turn on the garden hose.  Of course that was while my brothers and I played outside.  In the refrigerator in the kitchen there was a glass jar with a twist off metal cap.   This was the cold water.  And who ever drank the last iced water would fill the jar and put it back in the refrigerator.  We also would file the metal ice trays with water. Now that was a trick, balancing two ice trays while opening the refrigerator and slipping them into their little box.

Which that reminds me of defrosting the refrigerator. The melting ice, banging on with a hammer or rolling pin, something to get it break off the sides of the wall of the ice box.  Finally when the job was done, the refrigerator was cleaned out and there was virtually nothing in the freezer. 

As a summer treat, my father would take a few pieces of ice and wrap them in a dish towel.  He then took a hammer and cracked the ice.  He would open up the towel, scoop up the ice and put it in a small bowl and then sprinkle the ice with sugar.  What a great treat!

My work has undergone so many changes, too.  I am a pre-computer Realtor.  Can you imagine? It’s like I started selling before dirt. We manually typed our listings, there were these huge books that came out once a month and we were not allowed to let anyone borrow it, all the information was confidential.  We would go by offices and pick up keys and then return the key after the appointment.  How ancient we were.  Now we have Palm Pilots, which are phone, cameras, Internet connections, all our listings have tons of photos, tours, google earth, e-mail and on and on.

How much will things change in the future.  Just in my own lifetime, WOW.

BB