No sugar tonight - in my coffee

No sugar tonight - in my tea.
No sugar to stand beside me
No sugar to run with me

Or so the lyrics go to a  favorite Golden Oldey song by The Guess Who. And it's literally so; in order to make the necessary life changes to continue on my weight loss, sugar has to go.

If you know me at all, you know I love me some coffee. Coffee on the patio to start my day, coffee of an evening to top off a most excellent day. Sometimes coffee in mid-afternoon just because. No foo-foo frilly barista-type drinks - just coffee. Good, plain coffee. With lots of sugar. Uh-oh.

I became a coffee drinker fairly late in life, but not as late as my parents. They took up coffee drinking well after they retired. Oh, I tried it in college, but mostly it was incentive to stay awake while studying. If I got sleepy, I had to drink some of the wretched stuff. Somewhere along the line I found out what good coffee tasted like. Especially good, sweetened coffee.

Barb does not drink coffee, so I'm left to my own devices. I'm a prime candidate for a Keurig machine, but they will have to get way cheaper. In the meantime, I know to the drop how much water and to the ground how much coffee is needed to make my two cups in the morning and two cups in the evening. And to the granule how much sugar to add. No cream, thank you.

Sugar. That's the problem. Nothing else tastes like sugar in hot coffee. Iced tea? Give me a couple of packets of the pink stuff. Works great in iced drinks. Pink stuff in coffee? Bleeaahh. Same for the yellow stuff, and the green stuff and the Stevia, and everything else artificial I have tried.  Sigh.

Sugar; a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose; responsible for the formation of colonies, perpetuation of slavery, transition to indentured labor, migration and abuse of people, wars between 19th century sugar trade controlling nations, ethnic composition and political structure of the new world, according to Wikipedia. And sweetness in my coffee cup no more.

By the way, according to Randy Bachman, who penned the first half of the song, the inspiration for the lyrics came after an incident when he heard a woman in a car shouting at a nearby man; as she was driving away she said: "And one more thing, you're getting no sugar tonight".


Neither am I.