Punderings

Hi, I’m Shane, and this is the third coffee shop I’ve visited today.

Admittedly, today is a rather unusual day, and the post title and lead-in is a cheap bit of hyperbole. Today is a day of inconveniently scheduled meetings, long drives, and a bunch of getting out of the way of a FOAF that I’m delivering the moving truck for. So this is not a normal day at all, and I rarely ever visit two coffee shops in one day – honest!

The day started with exactly not quite enough time to get anywhere between the morning dropoff and my first meeting. Hence, I decided to skip rush hour traffic, and drive just a couple of blocks to my coffee home, Peet’s in Lexington. The staff is great (Hi Janice!), there are plenty of tables, and for all the fact that they don’t offer free wifi, I really do find it a good place to focus on work without distractions. It’s also quiet enough in the back to be able to call into my meeting with good cell coverage. Since it was still early in the day, I opted for hot coffee here.

Meeting over, I then had enough time to drive home to do a couple of hours of work, which of course took longer than expected, and left me late to pickup the rental truck. Being hungry, hot, late, and in possession of one of the free sandwich coupons, I stopped at a convenient DD for my large iced, milk, half a sugar, hazelnut, and a flatbread sandwich to finish while waiting for rental truck paperwork. I must admit that I did not actually sit down at that coffee shop.

Truck delivered to the friend who’s moving, I now have a few hours to try to finish some work while they decide what to load up and what to leave behind. Of course, I have them drop me off at the closest Starbucks for another large iced, half-sweet, since now I really do need the free wifi to read my email. This time, I am sitting down.

I promise – I won’t do this again. This week I’ll pull my thermos out of the cupboard and start making iced coffee to bring with me. But today was just a little bit too much happening for that.

I hear you ask: so, how do they compare, these three highly branded corporate behemoths of the caffeine addiction trade? I’m not sure it’s completely fair to do a head-to-head, given the differing styles, but I will share this:

• I love Peet’s. Better coffee, better bar drinks, and a good variety of pastries that I happen to like. Always my favorite, but not always immediately convenient.
• DD is such a background to the fabric of life that it will always be important. I would never call it gourmet, but sometimes you just need a predictable cuppa, and I know I can always find a DD. Sadly, today’s iced was a tad down; I think they actually gave me too little sugar, which rarely happens (I often have to explain “just a HALF sugar, please”).
• The primary value to Starbucks is that when you really need a bar drink, you can always find a passable one. And in today’s case, the free wifi (with air conditioning and comfortable chairs!) was the important part.

And now, back to tracking the latest round of software defects…

Driving home from dinner, she spotted the big fat almost full moon low in the sky. Part-way home, it disappeared (behind the trees).
“Where did the moon go?”
“It’s behind the trees over that way.”
“I want to see the moon again.”
“Well, it’s behind the trees, but later when we’re driving we’ll be able to see it again.”
“I want to see another moon.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, there’s only one moon and we all have to share it.”
“Well, I’m two years old, so I want two moons in the sky for me.” [1]
{Stifled laughter erupts in the front seat.}
“Sweetheart, there really is only one moon for everyone. It’s the same moon for all of us.”
“Well, there should be another one.”

Priceless. Her delivery was flawless, too.

[1] This comes from our DD strategy, whereby we only buy Munchkins, and the accepted practice is that since she is 2 years old, she gets two Munchkins. When she turns three, she’ll get three Munchkins. I know, it won’t last forever, but I figure that buys us a couple more years of not having to giver her a whole donut yet (too much sugar, and much messier in the car).

Meaning I had two iced Dunkin Donuts coffees during the day. Yum. That was even after making real fresh ground Peet’s coffee this morning for breakfast. No, I don’t roast my own beans, but I do respect those who do. But I also very much enjoy the thin brown flavor of that local behemoth coffee shop, Dunkin Donuts. Little known fact (unless you read corporate history websites): the 100th Dunkin Donuts franchise opened in 1963, and the 1,000th franchise in 1979! No wonder I feel a kinship with the local chain, and remember Fred so fondly.
But the story isn’t about the donuts, and it isn’t even about the coffee, since heck, it wasn’t that hot today. The second iced was to get through putting my father’s air conditioner in, which always ends up being hot and sticky work no matter the weather. This post is actually about another song of my daughters, titled simply enough “Dunkin Donuts”. I sure hope their lawyers come emailing down my website to complain about trademark violations…

Dun-kin Doooo–nuts
Dun-kin Doooo–nuts
Dunnn-kin Doooo–nuts
The store is very far from heeere

Well, we had just left one DD, and were just driving past another DD on the other side of the road (if you know the Fresh Pond circles, you know what I mean), but it was a very cute song nonetheless. I was really hoping she’d continue, but the next verse to the same tune was about going to the pool, which we were about to do. More later about my theories on the Dunkin Distance, and the average Dunkin Daily Drive Time later.

We spent the weekend itself at Mim’s in CT.  The new-traditional way (especially since I could spend the day packing the car) is to come home, have dinner, and wait until it’s almost Roxie’s bedtime.  Then we get in the car, and she falls asleep.  We stop at Dunkin Donuts on the pike, and then enjoy the coffee and sit and talk in the dark (remember how you always used to do that in younger days?) for a couple of hours on the drive.

The weekend was hectic, and I’m not quite sure how.  Everyone came over at various points, and Roxanne had a lot of fun playing with her similarly-aged relatives.  Nice food, as always – thanks Mim!  Unfortunately Roxanne wouldn’t fall asleep, and woke up at 6am each day, so we were pretty beat.  Plus she was under the weather and cranky for most of Sunday.

Labor day itself was a minor train wreck as we were all still tired and Amy had to do some work.  I finally got Roxanne out of the house around 3pm, draggy and tired.  But then we had a great time at the little park, then went to the big park, and did all sorts of stuff: playground, swings, slides (even the BIG slide!), and watched some kites flying.  She says she wants her kite to be blue.  I tried to point out that the sky is blue, which makes that difficult, then thought the better of it.

It turns out we spent over 2 hours at the park when we came home for a quick dinner.  Then I was off to gaming and Amy finished up her work, so we were up late again.  Ugh.  Can’t wait for next weekend to actually catch up on sleep!