The coffee cup

Here's the promised story, abbreviated and somewhat boring, about the coffee cup graphic in my blog title.

Sometimes, when I dream the seemingly impossible for long enough, I add details to the dream that can range from meaningful to downright silly. "Someday, if I ever have a bunch of kids, I'll get a big white van and we'll go off on adventures together..." "Someday, if I ever live in a two story house, I'll get one of those nifty basket thingies for the bottom of the stairs..."

And so it was with the dreams of "our own dojo". We dreamed a lot together about how we would teach and what sorts of extra classes we would offer and how we would organize the curriculum. But there were some silly things that attached themselves, ever so slightly, to what I was dreaming, insignificant things really...things I never dared mention because they were so trivial.

But then, after five years of teaching at our church, and after moving three times until we finally settled into our current wonderful location, we turned not just the big dreams into reality --- a reality even better than the dreams --- but we also turned some of the silly, trivial semi-dreams into reality as well.

And one of those was coffee in the dojo. We don't just have a coffee maker, a clone of the Bunn single serve coffee maker I have at home, but we also have an esspresso maker. And you know what? I can't imagine a dojo without one. At least not my dojo.

So I have my little rituals. Often I reward myself for my 6:00 a.m. private workout or my 6:00 a.m. women's fitness class with a nice cappuccino afterwards. That's also my drink of choice during belt tests; as I joke, the testing panel should be comfortable and enjoying themselves while the students aren't.

So one morning, I found myself taking pictures of my delicious cappuccino on the "sensei bench" next to my black belt. (There was a particular purpose I had in mind for this picture, but this story is already long and tedious enough.)

Yesterday, as I was looking for images for my blog header, it seemed that this particular picture, edited a bit, was exactly right. If you look closely, you can see a bit of my black belt in the shadows to the right of the cup.

This post, along with my entire blog, is copyrighted. Please read and honor the copyright notice at the bottom of the sidebar. Thank you.