After completing the first part of the To Do List at Mission coffee, I was excited to try some of the other shops in the area. Coffee is one of my favorite drinks, but I rarely ever get it from specialty or artisan shops simply because there are none near where I live in Cleveland and I usually prefer to just make my own at home. This assignment provided me with a reason to expand my experience with coffee and visit Impero, One Line, Kafe Kerouac, and Boston Stoker.

One Line

One Line was the first coffee shop that I visited for this portion f he Columbus To Do List, however this was not the first time I had been there. Last time I went, I got one of their pour over coffees and did not love it, so this time I decided to get a cappuccino. The drink was delicious and the atmosphere of the shop was nice, with some standing desks and sitting areas in the back, however there was not a lot of room. This would be a good place to come and meet someone, but because the space is somewhat limited, doing homework there would probably not work well. Overall, I would recommend this shop to a friend, however I would not recommend their pour over unless you like strange flavors in coffee.

Boston Stoker

One of my favorite things about this shop was that, in addition to having different beans, they also had a selection of ways to have the coffee prepared. I decided to take advantage of this and have one of their coffees made in a french press, which I thought was very cool. Unfortunately, however, the coffee was not great. During my visits to all of the coffee shops, I noticed that there seemed to be a trend of having very strange flavors in the drinks. When looking at the descriptions of all of the different beans they have, the flavors would be something like, “blackberry with smoke” and that simply does not sound appealing to me. While this shop did not specify the flavors, it did taste similar to some of the other shops that had very exotic, and in my opinion bad, coffee. Other than this, the shop had a lot of room to sit and desks to work at and I would recommend it to a friend mainly because they have smoothies as well, which is something many coffee shops do not serve.

Impero

The first thing that I noticed when walking into this shop was that it was very small. There did not seem to be a lot of room to sit around or study, but this was more than made up for by the fact that they seemed to serve normal coffee. They had a selection of frozen drinks, some food, and most importantly coffee that did not, “have hints of chocolate and rose.” I had been trying to get the drip or pour over coffee at the places I went because that tends to have a more distinct flavor from shop to shop, and this one was the best of them all because it was just simple, normal coffee. Out of all of the shops that I visited, this is the one I would most recommend for someone who actually wanted coffee.

Kafe Kerouac

Out of all of the coffee shops, Kafe Kerouac had a different feeling than the rest. The others, for the most part, felt like they were there for you to come in and get coffee, then leave. There was usually room for a few people to it and maybe for one or two to do work, but that was about it. This shop felt much more like they wanted you to come in and stay for the whole day because of the numerous books, board games, and even the fact that they have poetry readings. Unfortunately, it is pretty far away from my dorm and I am not a big fan of poetry, but for someone who was closer, it would be a very nice place to come and hang out. Another downside that I noticed was that their coffee seemed to have the strange taste that I noticed in most of the other specialty shops, so I would not get it again. Even though the coffee was not great, I would still recommend this shop to a friend because of the great atmosphere and abundant desk space.

During the final week of my Earth Month challenge, my goal was to take the stairs rather than the elevator all but three times throughout the week. This was a particular challenge for me because I live on the tenth floor of Morill Tower, therefore it is very time and energy consuming to climb up or down that many stairs. While the challenge was difficult to complete, it saved more energy than any of my other challenges because I come and go from my dorm multiple times each day and used to use the elevator every time.

One thing that I learned from this challenge is that, while I already get a lot of physical exercise, I am never really too tired to take the stairs. There were several days where it seemed like after all of the walking I had already done that day, I would not be able to make it all the way up to the tenth floor. On these days, I convinced myself that I should at least try and every time I made it all the way up. This showed me that the largest part of this challenge, contrary to what I thought coming into it, is actually the metal aspect.

Overall, while it was intended to be the most involved of my challenges, it was not the most difficult. This is because I am much more motivated after I have had a little bit of time to wake up and I typically do not mind physical activity, therefore the stairs were not too bad. The challenge that ended up being the most difficult was by far week three, which was to take cold showers, and this was challenging only because I had to work on it immediately after waking up in the morning.

For the third week of the Earth Moth Challenge, my goal was to take cold showers and to make them shorter. So far this has been the most difficult challenge by far because it has been difficult to convince myself to make the water cold when I am still tired and just got out of a warm bed. Another challenging aspect was that I would sometimes simply forget that I was trying to complete a challenge because it takes a little while for me to wake up completely in the morning, and I usually shower as soon as I get out of bed. The way that I found to stop myself from forgetting was writing “cold shower” on the palm of my hand in marker or pen each night before going to bed so that I would see it when I woke up in the morning. This worked fairly well and helped me get into the habit of paying attention to the temperature of my shower. As I stated previously, it was very difficult to convince myself to follow through with this challenge, however I did find one strategy that helped quite a bit. This strategy was to start the shower out warm when I first got in, and then within the first few minutes slowly turn the heat down until it was all the way cold. While this could be considered “cheating” on my challenge, I do not think I would have followed through with the challenge if I had not done it, and taking showers that are cold almost the whole time is still much more environmentally sustainable than keeping it hot the whole time.

After completing my challenge this week and seeing how difficult it was, I believe that my week four challenge will be much easier. While walking up ten flights of stairs multiple times per day is certainly not an easy task, I much prefer physical activity to simply being cold, so it will be much easier for me to do.

The challenge that I did for my second week of Earth month was to go outside as much as possible instead of watching TV or playing video games. While doing this challenge, I found that the hardest part was that going outside to do something is much more of a commitment in terms of time and energy than staying in is. I found that if I had homework but wanted to take a short break before doing it, I would always worry about how long it would take for me to go out and do something because that almost always requires me to walk somewhere first and shower after. I also found myself considering whether or not I would have the energy left to do my work if I went and did something active, but after convincing myself to actually try it, I found that being tired was not too much of an issue.

I also found that time seems to move much more slowly when you are active and moving around; when I used to sit inside for an afternoon, it would fly by and seem like the blink of an eye. When going outside, I found that I would feel satisfied with my break in a much shorter amount of time and I would also feel like I had actually accomplished something after, so even though I would have to shower after, it actually took less time and I felt better after.

Over the course of the week, I was able to do some of my favorite activities such as skateboarding and rock climbing much more frequently than I usually do, which made the week very enjoyable. My next challenge, which is to take colder showers, will not be nearly as fun. It is going to be extremely difficult to convince my tired self to get out of bed ad into a cold shower in the morning, but I am hoping that once I do it, I will get out much faster and therefore have a little more time in my day. This time could be spent outside, doing homework, or even sleeping, but no matter what it will be better spent outside of the shower.