Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Off to Milwaukee today for a week of dealing with auditors.  This should be a great day to fly Northwest, with the flight attendants and pilots relishing their brand-new bundle of pay cuts.  More from Cheeseland anon!

Our closest neighborhood cafe, and the place we’ve been buying our household beans, Zoka, has officially jumped the shark.  The store was mentioned in Friday’s edition of McPaper (USA Today) as one of the “10 great places to get jazzed about great java.”

Great.  It was hard enough to get a seat there before.  Now, since I live 3 blocks away, should I worry that my sidewalk will be thronged with caffeine pilgrims with disposable cameras making a flashbulb shock-and-awe, breaking off pieces of my retaining wall and pulling up my crocuses for souvenirs?  Is there money to be made if I set up a portable espresso stand and sell shots to people waiting in line to get in Zoka’s door?

Um, probably not.  I don’t know how many people in Seattle not staying in hotels read USA Today.  I only know about the article because a friend in Wisconsin emailed and asked if I knew about Zoka.  It’s more likely that their marketing person hit a home run with the article placement.  The article’s source for the feature linked to a site called coffeereview.com, a place where an addict like me might waste a lot of time.  We’ll have to see what the long-term effect of the article will be.  If the baristas start wearing sunglasses at night, setting up websites of their own and signing their cups for money, we might have to walk an extra block and patronize the other hundred or so cafes within walking distance.

Spring started sneaking in here Thursday and Friday while my back was turned.  Crocuses and daffodils are out and buds are burgeoning on just about everything in the yard.  (clicky to enlarge)

This one’s so gaudy it could be neon.

Looks like Eric is about to complete his ill-advised journey from sunny San Diego to rainy, phlegmatic Vancouver BC.  On the way, they saw fit to commit an act of  gratuitous violence on yours truly, for which I’ll find a suitable way to repay him.

Stay tuned for the exciting climax.

Here’s an entertaining little exercise if you’ve got work that absolutely must be done by noon and you’re looking for ways to blow the deadline.  (Thanks, Kathy!)  It’s a map of all the states you’ve visited.  Since it leaves no room for nuance, I chose to list only states where I’d spent a couple of days, commingled a little, gone running and otherwise engaged their indigenous charms.  I skipped states that I’ve only driven through or landed in briefly but never ventured away from the airport.  If those were included, I’d add NE, RI, NJ, WV, KY, MO, IA.  

If I excluded states where I’ve done significant time for business but never visited voluntarily,  TX would disappear, as would NC, NV, MN and ID.  Funny about MN, because I’ve spent so much time at the MSP airport that I probably ought to file an income tax return, but otherwise have only driven directly through it, except for a software class in Eden Prairie.  ND gets a checkmark because, on one of our drive-throughs, we took our bikes off the car and rode through the Theodore Roosevelt Badlands park.

create your own visited states map

The idle mind, ever striving for its own extinguishment, wonders how much the map would shrink if it included only states where it had had sex. It conjures the image of Mrs. Perils saying, “It better shrink a lot!”  Shrinkage is indeed the wise choice here.