Morning!

Gooooooood Morning readers!

And how are you on this gray morning? (its gray in NYC at least, I don't know what the weather is like in the other places we have readers, like Saudi Arabia).

I'm drinking my coffee, as I'm sure you've come to expect, sitting in bed, and listening to a Leonard Cohen station on Pandora.  Does it get more perfect?

I know I've posted a lot about our page views in the past few days, and for hopefully a little while, this will be the last one, but we broke the 1000 page view mark last night.  Our site hasn't been up a full week.  We started blogging last Friday on a whim.  Fletch and I were finishing up lunch and didn't know what to do with the rest of our day.  So we set up the site and bought www.hireusplease.com for $12.  We can't say that 1000 pageviews in less than a week blew away our expectations, because we didn't have expectations.

By way of comparison,  consider the underpants gnomes episode of South Park.  The gnomes business model (btw, the Arrested Development-watching-readers just giggled) looked something like:

Step 1:  Steal underpants
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Make $.

By Comparison, here is our business model:
Step 1: Start blog
Step 2: ?
Step 3: ?

We had less expectations than the UNDERPANTS GNOMES!  So, a few hours shorts of a full week later, we've had over 1000 hits, and readers in such distant places as South Korea, Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia.

Ok, so here is how my day is looking.  I don't know how much time I'm going to have to write.  I've agreed (for money!) to help a friend out with some clerical work around her office for a few hours.  Then later tonight, I'm putting in another shift at The Bar (again for money!).  So, I'm going to be busy, but I'll try to get something up in the few hours between these two commitments.

Please keep up the support, keep reading, keep clicking ads.  Its so appreciated.

Why I... Splurge on Expensive Coffee Beans

This is the first post in a series called "Why I..." in which I explain why I do certain things that might seem irrational given my current lack of any real income.

Starting off my day with one or two giant cups of coffee really makes me happy. I started drinking it back when I was in college, and boy do I really love it.  Not just the caffeine kick, but the whole experience.  Making it, the smell, the first sip.  Its a major part of my morning routine.

As any coffee drinker knows, the economics of coffee can get pritaaaay pritaaay scary (quick sidebar: how does one type in a Larry David voice? Any suggestions are strongly encouraged). Lets crunch some numbers: If you buy 1 cup per day, each day of the year, and the average cup of coffee costs $3 than you've spent a staggering $1,095 dollars on coffee in a year. Now, I don't know how to multiply a number that I just multiplied other numbers to get to, but if you drink, more than one cup of coffee a day, that yearly number starts to get bigger.

So, where does this leave me? My coffee is not a compromise I'm willing to make. I'll crash on someone's floor or eat ramen noodles for a week, but keep your dirty f'in hands off my coffee.

And its not just that I want coffee, I want GOOD coffee. And since I'm already saving a buttload of money by home-brewing, I'm gunna spend some of that money on a bag of excellent coffee beans. And really, its not that much money. After conducting extensive market research, and by that I mean, remembering things, I've found that Dunkin Donuts beans cost around $8.99/lb, the same amount of vastly superior Stumptown or intelligensia beans cost roughly $15/lb. So really, when I'm drinking several cups of the stuff a day, I'm still saving potentially thousands of dollars a year by using the good stuff.

To connect this to something bigger, right now when things have the potential to get bleak, treating yourself well is probably the most important thing you can do. And for me, that means a delicious cup of hot french-pressed Stumptown Holler Mountain coffee (half + half, no sugar) each morning.