Killing time

I never thought this would happen to me…but I have found that I really do like getting to work earlier than everyone else. If I can walk in with my coffee at 7:45, knowing that nobody will come in or call for at least an hour or more, and I’m able to work through my email, change the tapes on the backup servers, and generally ease into the workday – everything goes so much better. I don’t really have set coverage hours here, but I have sort of chiseled out the standard 8-5 (by the way, the cliche is “9 to 5”, how on earth did we end up with 8-5? Somebody wanna explain this?) and found that the best hour of the day is the first one.
I think the coffee helps. In the interest of saving money and helping force me up in the morning, I’m trying to grind my own beans again. Whole Peruvian beans from the farmer’s market (roasted on Saturday, no less, they’ve just finished oiling out to the point I can start using them tomorrow), a grinder and a French Press (or the little one-cup filter-drip unit the wife put me onto) – and if I can get 15 minutes before leaving, I can leave with a full thermos bottle and maybe another mug besides. Whether I should drink quite that much coffee in a day is another matter. Back in the day, a cup of coffee was 8 oz – now there are some places whose large coffee is triple that size. And I know the coffee’s more potent now than it was back in the day when it was half Sanka, half sawdust.
I know it’s still a while until college football starts, but I am seriously fighting the urge to go out and buy a pile of Vanderbilt stuff (water bottle, valve caps, foam rubber sword, visor, etc etc). I think I may be back on the “grasp for Vandy to be my official alma mater” tip. I won’t go on endlessly about that again, but suffice to say that if you had a choice between Vanderbilt and Actual Alma Mater, you’d grasp too.
BTW, that little Nokia 1112 has been on continuously for almost 3 days now and still shows a full 5 bars of battery life. I am now committed to using this until the battery dies, and at this rate, I may not go back to the iPhone before the new firmware comes out.