I got addicted to coffee considerably later than most folks I know. Through most of my twenties I had a tradition of getting a fancy drink at the coffee shop on board the ship where I worked on the last day of the cruise before settling in to do my end of cruise paperwork and prep for the next one. Other than that I would just grab the occasional cup here and there with friends.

In my early thirties I was out on tour with several caffeine addicts and Starbucks stops became a regular thing. And they are the perfect gateway coffee drug with their coffees that are actually mostly milk and sugar.

While I am still not a die hard coffee drinker, I am a most of the time coffee drinker and I do own a frequently used coffee pot.

And for some reason, I break coffee pots like it’s my job.

Seriously, it is probably coming up on 10 coffee pots I have broken for one reason or another.

I’m genuinely not even sure how I keep doing this.

And I was thinking about this the other day after a narrow miss when I dropped yet another coffee pot (fortunately it survived the fall).

I sighed because I knew it might be difficult to find another coffee pot.

Because I’m fairly cheap sometimes. And when I broke my last coffee pot, things were a little tight. Of course, I checked around to see if I could find a replacement carafe for the coffee maker I currently had – a fairly cheap but not completely cheap coffee maker. It did even have a timer.

But apparently cheap enough for the company to have gone out of business in the brief three to four months I’d had the thing before breaking it. And I could not find a replacement coffee pot.

So I just bought the cheapest coffee maker I could find. And a few weeks after buying the new, cheap coffee maker, I just thought, maybe while I have a few dollars, I will buy a replacement coffee pot. Because, let’s face it, I know myself. And during that search, I found I had repeated the same stupid thing I’d done the first time and couldn’t find a replacement coffee pot for the incredibly cheap brand. I looked around for any that would probably work, but I just didn’t feel sure about what I was looking at.

And I sighed.

At my own cheapness.

It strikes again.

You see, I have also shattered two of my parents’ coffee pots (it’s a real skill, I have) and the coffee maker at my dad’s is fairly fancy. So finding a replacement pot is not hard. Also not super cheap, but not difficult, and cheaper than a whole new coffee maker.

Yet I find this ridiculous gamble necessary every time I buy my own coffee maker.

And yet – I also find my coffee pot reflects my freelance life so much.

An excellent coffee pot on the counter generally means things have been really good and a bottom of the life Walmart/Tesco saver coffee pot? Maybe things aren’t quite going as planned.

Just the other day I was thinking about how my dad was constantly saying we didn’t have money for things when I was growing up – but everything we needed was always there. And, honestly, an awful lot of what we wanted, if not everything. My dad owns his own carpentry business.

After I stopped reeling from one of those moments when you realize you’ve turned into one of your parents – I realized I finally understood what he meant all those years. Stability looks very different as a freelancer and often parallels how busy we are – with the neverending knowledge in the back of our minds that it may all dry up at any minute.

So maybe my cheapness is not always the worst thing because $20 more in the bank rather than a nicer coffee pot is sometimes worth quite a bit more.

And the occasional splurge when work is booming – totally ok too.