Yesterday I met friends for coffee, attended my OLLI class, and met with my Esperanto group. Today is my taiji class, an open house where my mother-in-law lives, and a Winfield Village board meeting.
Am I not the most socialist of all possible butterflies?
Check out the spectacular owl on the table in the Steeple Coffee House. Having after-lunch coffee with @jackieLbrewer.
At the Romero Street Gallery in Old Town Albuquerque, Rosie noticed me admiring this mug, bought it for me, and had the gallery ship it to me. Very handsome, and about twice the size of the coffee cups I usually drink my morning coffee out of. (So, moar coffees for me!)
Whenever I tweet about a company, I like to go ahead and tag the company in the tweet, so they can see what I’m saying about them. Besides that, I’ve a natural inclination toward brand loyalty (for companies whose products I like), so I like to keep up with what the company is doing, and twitter is a good way to do that. (Not nearly as good a way as an RSS feed, but that’s neither here nor there.)
The upshot is that I’m not infrequently searching for a company’s twitter handle—and just lately, I’m pretty often not finding one. More and more companies are limiting their social media presence to Facebook and Instagram—both of which are terrible choices.
Facebook is very bad. It tries to monetize passing on information! It deliberately holds back information that the company wants to share and that I want to see, specifically in order to pressure the company to pay up.
Instagram may be even worse. It is inherently about sharing pictures, whereas information is often best presented as text. Worse yet, it won’t share links, which is almost always what companies (should) want to do, if they’re trying to tell me about the sorts of things I want to hear about.
Twitter is a bad company that provides a service which is bad in many ways, but at least it will show me all the tweets of the company I’ve followed, tweets which can include text and links as well as pictures.
The photo at the top is of a donut I bought this morning at Industrial Donut—the latest company I noticed limiting its social media presence to Facebook and Instagram.
Excellent waiter actually kept up with the rate at which Jackie and I drink coffee.
I was up early today—early enough today to bring Jackie a cup of bed coffee.
I can drink my morning coffee from a kaffeino mug.
Today is National Gourmet Coffee Day! (Bonus: At Great Harvest Bread Company, where Jackie is working these days, cups of coffee are 50% off today.)
Just a little post to brag on our townhouse, which is gradually getting set up the way we want it.
Of course, unpacking is a lot of work (on top of all our other work)—but that’s okay. When we need a break, we can sit in the window seat upstairs in the study.
I’m planning to get a wedgey cushion, but for now these two pillows are doing a fine job. Behind them on the window sill you can see: My tablet (which I’ll get back to reading a book on, as soon as I post this), my coffee flask, Wellington (one of my science fictional elephants, and sometimes the elephant of surprise), Norman the Chambered Nautilus, a tiny little Ganesh sculpture, a plastic yogurt container (currently empty, but used to hold odds and ends), and a tube full of brightly colored cat toys. And, of course, behind that you see the tree outside the window, and beyond that a view of Winfield Village looking east from our townhouse.
Jackie started noticing some years ago that waiters seemed not to understand that cream is an actual, specific thing. Waiters would offer her cream for her coffee, and then bring some industrial concoction of water, corn syrup, tropical oils, and mono- and di- glycerides (sometimes including some milk solids).
She learned to ask for milk instead, because even waiters seem to understand that milk is an actual, specific thing.
This week, for the first time, we observed the reverse. The waiter offered to bring “creamer,” so Jackie said she’d drink her coffee black. I’m new enough to drinking coffee that I’ve never had creamer, so I figured I’d give it a try and said, “Sure, bring some creamer.”
The waiter brought actual cream.
I can see restaurant owners urging waiters to offer cream when what they’re bringing is some much cheaper substitute, the same way they tell waiters to claim that the vegetables are fresh when they’re actually frozen. But no one would think it made sense to offer some cheap substitute and then bring the real thing.
The only explanation I can think of is that people these days don’t know what cream is. And I guess that makes sense. When my parents were kids, people still got unhomogenized milk, where the cream would literally rise to the top, so they knew it was an actual, specific thing. But we’re now two generations removed from that. Plenty of time for people to forget what cream is.
