Calling All Coffee Connoisseurs

I am going to be 42 years old in nine days. And I am, just now, becoming entranced with coffee, after all this time spent insisting that I hated it, wanted nothing to do with it.

Then I started talking my walks for exercise, and combining them with the errands I needed to run. And they invariably walked me past Starbucks. And the Siren's call came floating out, and the next thing I knew...

Eventually, though, the 'frugal' side of me won out over the newly minted coffee-loving part of me. And so I asked Baroy for a small coffee maker for Chanukah, and got one. And I used a gift car my mother sent me to get an electric coffee grinder.

But, dude, this coffee I'm drinking? Isn't very good. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. This is literally the first time in my life that I've made coffee, so it could be anything. Too little water? Too much? Too many teaspoons of ground coffee? Too few? The wrong kind of coffee? A bad brand? I'm lost! I need an Idiot's Guide to Making a Good Cuppa Coffee, methinks.

For the record, I can only drink decaf. Sad, but true. I'm one of those people who gets about every negative physiological and psychological side effect from caffeine. When I was younger, my friends used to think it was hysterical to give me a Coke and watch me go a little bit crazy. Once, when I was about 12, I got so hopped up on caffeine that I tried to fly off of the top step of a porch at my sleep-away camp. I wound up in the infirmary, and was picking gravel out of the cuts and scrapes down my left thigh for weeks afterwards.

And my current preference, because I'm a neophyte, is for flavored coffee--vanilla, to be precise. But it tastes like dreck when I make it. Should I just be making regular coffee and adding a few drops of vanilla to it? Do I have to buy some vanilla syrup or something? I haven't the faintest.

Help! I need to catch up to the rest of you! I need to be an adult! Can you help?