We’ve been on a drinking binge lately.

Ordinarily we drink water, milk, and pop (not necessarily in that order), and, when the weather’s colder, coffee and tea. Late in the summer we started branching out a bit and put a fair amount of energy into iced coffee. For several weeks Olof and I were drinking at least a half-dozen of these drinks a day, between us. Olof’s two-liter-a-day Coke habit all but disappeared.

After a while, my enthusiasm for iced coffees diminished somewhat, and, influenced heavily by Helena, I turned my attention to carbonated water. The two of us spent another several weeks trying out different brands and flavors before settling on Vichy Nouveau as our favorite (the mango-papaya flavor is especially good).

Tiring, ultimately, of daily runs to the store for more bubble water, Olof and I bought a Soda Stream machine a couple of weeks ago, and these days we’re carbonating our own water (and various other potables, as the mood strikes). I admit that I do prefer the store-bought variety, but it is more convenient and much cheaper to use our own machine.

We’re still drinking plenty of water, but now that the weather has turned decidedly wintry, warm drinks are sharing top billing with their chillier counterparts. I’ve been enjoying hot chocolate for the past week or so, while Olof has developed an increased interest in coffee. Last month he came upon an article extolling the virtues of roasting one’s own coffee beans at home, and he was intrigued by something he thought was entirely new (he forgot, somehow, that his sister and brother-in-law had indulged a similar interest a few years ago and that he himself had bought unroasted beans for them on at least one occasion). Fired up as he was, he hunted up a distributor of unroasted beans and ordered a starter pack containing 500 grams each of five different kinds of coffee. Our maiden mission in coffee roasting wasn’t entirely successful–we didn’t roast them long enough–but our two or three subsequent endeavors have gone rather well. I’m not sure I’d say that the end result is worth all the extra work, but it is a pretty darn tasty cup of coffee.

All of this has been entertaining, but I’m not sure where we go from here. Maybe it’s time for us to get that goat I’ve been hinting to Olof about. We could learn to appreciate goat’s milk, right?