So... I’ve been fasting for Holy Communion from midnight on until Mass, water only. It should be known that I take sedating meds before bed and when I wake up so The drive to Mass has been treacherous, like I’m going to kill someone treacherous, and then I’m in a fog for the Liturgy. So, to my wonderment I discovered at Walmart litres of caffeinated water!!! 1 litre with 120mgs of caffeine!!!! So today I had a pleasant drive to church and the service was Glorious!!!!! I could actually pray the Mass with attention and devotion! just my church life hack for today. Walmart. Caffeine water.
Back in the late '70s I bought some caffeine pills at a gas station, as I was trying to make a non-stop drive of about 1,000 miles through the night. Caffeine pills are probably still available, so there's another alternative.
When I was in the Navy I nearly became immune to caffeine. I was doing about 5 cups of coffee and a Monster every day and that was on the low end of the average consumption of sailors. Our officer in charge bought a Keurig for the department and we wore that thing out in 7 months.
I think during the pandemic we should have a Keurig communion wine maker. Just consecrate the little cups.
HAH! Caffeinated water. That's cutting out the middleman. I've recently had to pull out an old favorite - Valhalla Java Odinforce Blend. It's made by the same people who make Death Wish coffee. It's not QUITE as strong on the caffeine, and a bit more flavorful. I find one cup works for me, and since I drink coffee black there are no calories, so I feel like it fits into the idea of fasting. It's also a bit more pricey, but I drink less of it and switch to water after that so it balances out.
Nuts.com sells chocolate covered espresso beans. Tasty little things, for those who are into coffee. My brother sent me some. I just looked, and they have a number of coated coffee beans available... even a sugar-free variety. Not that this will help anyone who is fasting before communion, but for those who like a zippy snack. https://nuts.com/chocolatessweets/chocolate-covered-espresso-beans/ This gets me thinking... since communion involves wine mixed with water, would a priest be allowed to use caffeinated water? Or would that be verboten? Not that I'm advocating; I'm not really into caffeine that much. I'm not really even much of a coffee drinker (maybe a cup every few weeks). Matcha tea is something I've picked up lately (due to the influence of a granddaughter who loves it), but that is less for the caffeine content and more for the flavor and (surprising and unexpected) perceived prostate benefit.
No, but I'll add a little dash of milk most of the time. Which is unusual for me, since I take my other teas straight.
Hmmmm.... I like the milk idea a great deal. Now that as well as a little agave.... that seems drinkable!!!
On the ship the enlisted mess had 3 huge coffee urns. I think they held about 3 gallons a piece, maybe even 4. There was a 4th coffee urn in the forward mess (a carrier has tons of crew messes but they are segregated by rank). The aft mess coffee was a blend of Maxwell House that is supposedly proprietary to the US armed forces. The forward mess had Starbucks Pikes Place Roast. Nearly every department had their own coffee pot too. You could actually go down to the supply room and be issued a weekly ration of coffee for your department coffee pot. The only time the mess decks did not have coffee was morning cleaners, when the whole ship gets cleaned for an hour. The coffee urns were descaled and sanitized at that time each day. We also had a Starbucks on the ship! It was just off of the mess deck and they had sent about 8 crew members to an actual Starbucks for training on how to make the drinks. We didn't get the full menu but they made most of the sweet ones. I never understood people who would buy a regular cup of coffee from the Starbucks since it was available for free in the forward mess. We had Red Bull vending machines on the mess deck too. They had to be refilled about every 3 or 4 days, that's how much Red Bull was being bought. The first few days all of the heavy drinkers would discretely mix it with vodka or Everclear to ward off the shakes until they dried out (no, that is not a licit activity but people would do it anyway). We took on some RAF (Royal Air Force) guys one time that needed to do flight deck training and they asked us where the ships beer taps were! My buddy and I replied that we had just come out of overhaul and didn't know but when they found them could they come back and tell us where (we didn't actually have beer taps on the ship). The ship's store sold Monsters and I think they had Nos too but I never liked that brand. We missed a resupply one time and ran out of energy drinks for about a week. There were some extremely disgruntled people walking around. Marine bases used to stock Rip-it, which tastes terrible but it only cost 99 cents so people would buy it anyway. They stopped carrying the stuff a year or two ago. I've known guys who would drink as many as 7 energy drinks in a day.
I find this somewhat appalling. Did the Navy push their sailors so hard that they felt the need for all that caffeine to get the job done? Or was it just personal desires and habits driving this consumption?
A combination of both. And the availability of drinks. We had soda fountains and juice machines and fresh milk (usually) but they would be disabled if it wasn't a meal time. So the options were coffee, water, and whatever you might like from the ship's store. Also, some people had less access to good meals than others. The flight deck was the worst for that. If they were doing flight ops at peak tempo a lot of the air crew wouldn't be given the chance to come down to the mess decks. The galley would send box lunches up there. I worked in the dental office and our day went from 7;30 a.m.-8:00 p.m. with two one hour meal breaks. Some of the flight crew would log 16 hour shifts if there was a lot of air ops on the schedule. Some of the maintenance departments were more relaxed but there were a few specialty shops where there were only a handful of technicians and those guys were notorious for having the longest days in the belly of the ship. Then there were drills, which were typically scheduled at night to test the reaction time of the crew and the efficiency of people who had probably been sleeping 10 minutes before the alarm was sounded. And there were more mundane tasks like finding a time to wash your undergarments. The ships laundry would wash your uniforms but your undergarments and athletic attire and whatever sort of sleep wear you had were the responsibility of individual sailors. When there's a few thousand people that need to wash their clothes and a smallish laundromat (which was at least free to use) you sometimes find yourself doing laundry in the middle of the night. And most of the air wing berthings are up by the flight deck, which is not conducive to restful sleep. My berthing was close to the water line and there were 15 bunks but only 9-10 of us. Flight deck ops didn't really bother us in that location but if we were cruising at high speed during the night our bunks would shake like those old hotel beds you could put a quarter in. And we had one guy who liked to get up at 4:30 and exercise for an hour before cleaning up and making his way to the mess deck promptly at 6:00 when they started serving breakfast. That was annoying but you learned to go back to sleep pretty fast.
Here's a picture of the main portion of the mess deck. The food service staff had spent all afternoon setting it up for Thanksgiving dinner. It was actually nice too. We very seldom ate like that. The aft mess deck had 3 bays of approximately this many tables but all of the microwaves and the hot bars were in this one. The forward mess deck only had 2 seating bays and they were somewhat smaller. We had International Delight creamer available. On this particular ship Irish cream was not very popular and that would always be the last flavor left before we got a resupply.
Big ships sailors eh! You guys have never lived. Try doing Plane Guard in a 32 knots destroyer while the carrier flies off Vixens and Phantoms in the Indian Ocean. Great fun and two cans of beer and 1/3 of a gill of neat rum per day. Canteen messing, where you collect your scran from the ships galley and take it down to your own mess to eat it and wash up. Sleeping in a hammock in the main passageway was a pain though. Had to be up stashed and stowed before everyone went aft to the galley to collect their breakfast. Happy days. 1968-69 Far East Station. .
No such thing as rough seas when you're riding one of these with about 3 million gallons of jet fuel in the reservoirs, tons of munitions in the magazines, and enough food to feed 5,000+ people for 4-6 weeks stashed in various places (not to mention the 5,000+ people of various sizes). They did sometimes close all of the hangar bay doors in bad storms.