Welcome Work At Home Moms!

I get a buzz from working from home. Not from the adrenaline of being able to juggle 47 things at a time. Not from the sense of accomplishment at the end of a long, hard day. Nope. My buzz of choice is from caffeine.

I am a card carrying member of the Two Pepsi A Day club. The only problem is that it isn't working for me anymore. I am staying up later and getting up at the same time, which is creating a sort of comatose evil twin side of me that I haven't seen since my kids' newborn days. I have had several friends tell me that I need to switch to coffee because the effects are stronger.

Other than the fact that we sounded like a bunch of drug addicts, I thought this was a good idea. I have always secretly been a little jealous of the people who can walk into a Starbucks and get warm frothy loving' in the form of a Styrofoam cup.

I thought about heading to my local coffee palace to have them suggest which drink I should start my addiction with, but I was worried that I would incite a riot. I'm not sure who would have started it though - the people who work at Starbucks clawing to get me hooked on their most expensive product or the people behind me in line waiting for their cup o' joe while a newbie was broken in.

Because I am a closet nerd, I went to the Starbucks website for some education. On their site, they offer 29 different varieties of coffee. 29?!?! Are they kidding? Then I saw that they offered a coffee education section. Perfect.

Here I tried their Coffee Taste Matcher. This is a device that should, in theory, match you with your perfect cup of coffee. I thought I had found the help I so desperately needed. Then I started reading the questions. One of them asked if I liked my coffee "complex enough to make me think." Huh? Don't I do enough thinking all day without needing my coffee to add to it? And what would it make me think about?

Another question wanted to know if coffee was a "culinary experience" that would "challenge me to find new flavors." How many different flavors can one have in one cup of coffee? And a culinary experience? Please. A culinary experience for me is cooking something that doesn't come out of a box and is edible.

Well it turns out that if I want to be adventurous, I could get some of their Colombia Nariño Supremo. It is described as a nutty blend (perfect for me) and went on to say that coffees from this particular region "are celebrated for their great balance, medium body and clean finish." I had to double check the page I was on, because I thought I had stumbled onto a beer website. How can coffee have a clear finish?

This coffee stuff is complicated. Maybe I will just kick up my caffeine a notch by switching to Red Bull. At least for that I won't have to do research.

Alana Morales taught high school English for six years before becoming a freelance writer. She is a co-host on the new online radio show Mom Writer's Talk Radio (www.MomWritersTalkRadio.com). Her first book, Domestically Challenged, is due out in 2006. You may read more of her writing at her personal site http://www.alanamorales.com.