Today, this morning, in fact, I’m meeting up with a friend of mine from Lees Summit to have coffee in Lawrence at Aladdin’s Cafe. Why travel so far, you may be asking yourself? Well, fact is, I don’t know of any places in KC to get really good Turkish Coffee, and what I had at Aladdin’s Cafe was, in my opinion, phenomenal.

This friend, we’ll call him “John”, and I started up a small, informal coffee and book club when we worked together at M&I Bank. It was more of a coffee/book duo, rather than a club, since it was just the two of us, but we had fun. That’s all that really matters, no?

For the book club, he introduced me to the Christopher Snow series, by Dean Koontz. I introduced him to Tolkien, Frank Herbert, and Steven Brust.

For the coffee club, we went out and did our research, picked up some grinders, some presses, an Eva Solo CafeSolo, a Chemex Brewers, and a couple other items… all in the name of the perfect cup. We had a few successes, more than a few failures, and had a lot of fun doing it.

Though we don’t work together any more, I’m going to try to rekindle this little ditty. We had a good thing going, and I neither drink enough coffee at this point, nor read nearly enough books.