The good news: he brought it back.
Starbucks is fine. Once you learn to speak Starbuckese you can get a good cup of coffee quickly and at a not-outrageous price. But the overhead music is almost always too loud, the homeless people too smelly, and the ambiance sterile. Besides, they all have concrete floors and chairs that make a HORRIBLE scraping noise as they're moved in or out from the too-small tables. Why can't they put nylon nubs on the bottom of the chair legs???
One-off coffee shops are a crap shoot. Some of them are warm and welcoming with comfortable seating and a homey vibe. I prefer no music; that's why they invented ear buds. But if there is music it should be routes, or something slightly quirky without being too weird. There's a great coffee shop at the end of the tourist shop street in Florence, OR.
For just drinking coffee the best option, IMO, is a diner. The coffee is just coffee. Nothing that requires six words to describe the ingredients, the additives, and the size. You get a white porcelain cup and the waitress fills it with black coffee that came from nobody knows where.
What makes it the best option is that she comes back every ten minutes and tops off your cup and doesn't charge you a dime more. There aren't many things in life that work like that! (The waitress or the coffee.)
Some mornings all I want is a slightly frumpy and overworked waitress who keeps my coffee cup full of hot, black, coffee.
Annoying people are really annoying. Among the worst are 20-something prigs. (If you don't know the word prig you should learn it. I know it sounds like a dirty word, but that's half the fun in saying it. The prigs themselves are no fun at all.)
The Greek word for marketplace is agora. The Portuguese word agora means now. The accents are on different syllables, the final (Greek) and the penultimate (Portuguese).
One of the things I like about going to the gym is the feeling of success. Some days a person needs at least one thing that they can hang on to as a success, something that went like it was supposed to. A good workout leaves you tired, and sore, and feeling like you accomplished something. Of course you feel tired and sore, and that sucks, but at least you know you did good.
People who live in huge cities don't see stars at night. There's too much ambient light.
Have you ever been way out in the middle of nowhere and been awed by the stars you can see in the middle of a clear night? Imagine what someone from downtown Chicago, or from Manhattan, or Berlin would think.
Five miles outside of Elmira, OR is pretty much the middle of nowhere. Which is to say the night sky is pretty dramatic on the rare clear night.
Buddy simply canNOT resist cats. God, he's convinced, put them on earth solely to be chased.
No amount of shaming, scolding, or yanking on the leash deters him from giving pursuit if a cat is within 50 feet. Our barn cats, known as Cat One and Cat Two, seem either foolishly naive or evil. I suspect the latter.
Every morning I feed Buddy and then take him for his morning constitutional. Cats One and Two seem to intentionally bait him by scampering across his path, knowing he will A) give chase, and B) come to the end of his leash quickly and dramatically.
This morning one of them was on the back porch as I opened the door. Buddy always exits ahead of me and instantly spotted the creature. It ran, he took off after it, and in about 20' he hit the end of the reel-type leash I use for our morning walks. This all happened in about one second's time. By that point he'd reached the limit of the leash and built up a real head of steam.
I was just coming through the door and my right hand was yanked around the corner of the metal door by the force of his momentum . Which explains why the skin is missing from the knuckle of my right index finger.
Our local library hosts free one-session classes from time to time. Tonight's is on how to make your own fermented apple cider. Hmmm.
I'll let you know.
You'd think that by the time I was this close to 70 I'd have figured out how to stay on task for more than 34 minutes at a time. Nope. Can't do it.
(So you know this was written over the span of the entire day, right?)
No comments:
Post a Comment