Like all my brothers and sisters, I started drinking coffee at the age of 12. Growing up, my main chore before going to bed was to get the coffee ready for the morning. With a family of nine kids, we had one of those huge metal canister coffee machines, the type that makes 25 cups at a time and are usually found at church gatherings or in trailer offices at construction sites. My brothers and sisters would line up before the big coffee pot, cups in hand, shuffling back to the table to hunch over their bowls of Cheerios. It was like having breakfast in the state pen.

Maybe it was the cheap coffee, maybe it was the drudge work of scrubbing out that big metal canister, but in all the years since, I've been kind of ambivalent about coffee — a hot mug of java was just something I did in the morning, a reflex action after flipping on the kitchen lights and before opening my morning paper. I've done the math, and over my lifetime, I've downed approximately 25,000 cups of joe, and never really thought much of any of them. They were just there.

But then, this winter, we had a contractor come in to renovate our kitchen. It was one of those four-week projects that stretched and stretched until you begin to forget what life was like when you didn't eat a hot-plate dinner at a card table, when you didn't automatically assume that each and every meal was going to taste faintly of plaster dust.

As part of our efforts to keep a semblance of a normal everyday life, we moved our coffee maker from the kitchen to the master bathroom way up on the third floor. We got ourselves a little mini-fridge for creamer and lined up coffee cups on the edge of a shelf. The whole arrangement was perched on a little folding table in the corner, and we had to be careful not to bump into it. I normally have an iron clad rule (a phobia, actually) against preparing any food or drink in the same room where you go to the bathroom, but we had to make do.

The first few mornings, we would get up, grab a cup of coffee and then go downstairs to get kids ready for school. Then, after about a week, I started to set the timer on the coffeemaker for a little earlier, and sip a cup in bed before I even got moving.

The more I began to rely on the caffeine to get me started in the morning, the less able I was to get my blood moving all by my lonesome. Before I knew it, I didn't just want a cup in the morning, I needed it. I'd find myself stumbling from bed, feeling my way into the bathroom, pouring out two cups of coffee and then returning to bed without ever completely opening my eyes. (My wife didn't even do that much. Most mornings, she would just reach her hand out from under the covers and I'd pass her a cup while she was still shaking off rapid eye movement.) One morning, I stumbled into the bathroom to find that I'd forgotten to set the timer, and my angry curses woke the kids downstairs.

It got worse as the weeks went on. I would go to sleep at night thinking about that first cup in the morning, and sometimes would lie there in bed as I heard the coffee maker click on and the coffee start to gurgle through the filter, and I'd try not to giggle. I even thought about moving the coffee maker to my bedside table so I wouldn't have to walk the 18 steps (I counted) into the bathroom to get my fix.

With the kitchen construction finally over, there's no rational reason to keep the coffee maker upstairs anymore. We now have the kitchen we'd dreamed of, the perfect place to drink a cup while perusing the morning paper.

Instead, I spent the better part of last weekend turning the linen closet next to our bedroom door into a permanent coffee stand, running a new electrical outlet, and providing room below for our mini-fridge. Rows of coffee cups stand at the ready so I'll never run out. We may not have room for towels and sheets, but I've got my own shrine to the god Java.

Am I crazy? Chemically dependent? Just plain ole stupid? Maybe. But it's only 11 (Just 11!) steps to my new coffee bar.

I could probably get it down to six if we rearranged the furniture a bit.

To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.