Coffee Downstairs

One of the curious Pesach deprivations for me has been to declare My Space chametzdig.  I never clean it.  Rarely do I eat there, but not never.  And I drink coffee in the morning and on many an afternoon a tumbler of ice to which about 50 ml of bourbon or scotch is added, then sipped while I type at my laptop.  The room is chametz.  As a result, during Pesach, I do not bring anything edible here.  I keep a special Melitta cone for the Holiday along with a fairly elegant stainless steel one-tablespoon scoop.  Filter in cone.  I bought a pack of 100 a few years ago, use maybe 15, wrap and store the rest between years.  Two scoops of commercial canned coffee in filter paper, then drip boiling water to fill a cup.  A splash of milk. Do this twice a morning.  However, I have to drink it in the kitchen.

My cell phone would get me to the internet but I leave it upstairs.  I could transport my laptop to the kitchen but table space is tight.  So I drink the coffee at the kitchen table without connection to the rest of the world, except for the radio tuned to the classical station.  To accommodate this, I've moved my morning medicines to the kitchen table to ensure full adherence.

A disruption for sure, though a petty one.  Four Pesach days are Yontif, one is Shabbos, so there are really only three days in which I am separated from my laptop while I sip coffee at the kitchen table.  My dependence on my morning habit, now well entrenched, just makes it seem more burdensome, though the rest of the year I still take morning coffee, made in the Keurig Express, to my desk, shabbos and yontif included.  The laptop stays closed, but instead I scan my whiteboard with its semi-annual projects list and my weekly initiatives to pursue those goals.  Coffee to accommodate Pesach downstairs has a different feel.  Restrained, confining.  Certainly when I travel, I also have morning coffee in a different pattern, whether at the hotel's buffet, a restaurant, or sometimes from a dispenser that I bring to my room or a public lounge.  That never registers as inferior.  Pesach coffee at the kitchen table, made without the Keurig Express generates a different experience.   A lesser one, though a temporary one.