Journal

The landlord has been showing the apartment to prospective tenants. She schedules a time and I arrange to be out. She’d scheduled another showing this afternoon at 4:30. I didn’t have any errands to run this afternoon, having taken care of them all earlier today when she showed the place around lunchtime. So I wandered over to the café on the corner, Moonbeans.

In a turn-of-the-(last)-century building, Moonbeans is a trendy joint that tries, and succeeds, at being nicer and trendier than the café on Friends. What I like best about it, is that they’ve filled the windows on the sunny side with big ol’ comfy sofas and chairs with lots of throw pillows. It’s the perfect place to waste an hour reading in the sun.

Oh, yes, the sunshine returned yesterday, complete with arctic winds blowing in across the lake. The wind-chill is in the 30s. Yippie!

As I walked in, the girl behind the counter was busy wiping and rewiping all the machines while chatting on the phone. I undid my coat and took off my backpack. I studied the coffee choices, the pies and pastries, the menu, the furniture and I counted the walls. (Four, despite the building being triangular.) I studied the kitsch on the walls.

“I just don’t understand it,” she said into the phone. “Everyone I meet is so self-involved.”

Suppressing my laughter was the only thing that kept me from becoming angry and impatient. I studied the reading materials. I discovered a hardcover of Gone With the Wind and wondered who would like the book so much that they’d go to a café just to read it. I decided it was there for the purposes of ambiance.

“Oh. I have a customer. I’ll call you back,” she said disconnecting. Giving the back counter one last obsessive-compulsive scrub, she turned to me asking, “Can I help you?”

“Yes. What to you have in a nice decaf?”

This confused her since they only had one variety brewed. “Well, uh, we have our Colombian today,” she ventured.

“Yes, I see. But is it a nice decaf, or is it an ordinary one?”

“I’ve never tried it, but the customers seem to like it.”

She poured, I sipped. “Yes,” I told her, “you can report to all comers that this is indeed, a nice decaf.”

“Thanks,” she replied cheerily.

I paid, selected an overstuffed chair and pulled out my book. Filtered through a stained-glass panel, the sunshine was bright green. It clashed wonderfully with the dark burgundy chair I’d chosen.

The only other customers in the place were apparently having a business meeting at one of the tables. It was overflowing with papers and Daytimers, with an assortment of cheap portfolios piled at its base.

After a while their conversation drifted over. A girl in her twenties was speaking stridently, “Yeah, but what we should do is let anyone become a member of our credit union. That way we have the greatest income potential.”

This financial whiz had no clue that the law requires credit unions to have membership restrictions, like a club. If you let everyone make deposits and take out loans, it’s a bank. Besides, in a credit union, profits are distributed back to the depositors, not to the founders. It’s not the government that’s going to screw up Social Security. It’s the coming generation in the financial markets.

I harrumphed, curled up in my chair and went back to my book.

A few chapters later I was ready for a refill. Taking my cup to the counter, I found a co-worker had joined the countergirl. Shift change.

“So now I have to go out and buy some Tyvek,” complained the first girl, still wiping obsessively. “Where do you buy Tyvek?”

“I dunno,” answered the second. “Maybe you have to go to one of those places like Home Depot.”

“I doubt they’ll have it at Fabrics & Findings,” I offered, sliding my cup across the counter. They gave me annoyed looks.

Halfway through my second cup I noticed the traffic was all tied up outside. Construction has reduced University Avenue to one lane in each direction. It was rush-hour and now there was a disabled Taurus blocking the westbound lane. I watched one of the commuters get out of her car leaving it in the lane, and dash into the café.

“I’m gonna be stuck in that traffic for an hour. I need a cup of coffee,” she panted.

“Do you want that to go?” asked the second countergirl. Just as vacuous as the first. I decided that having a black hole in one’s head must be an employment requirement.

As I left, she was wiping the back counter just as intensely as the first girl had done. I wondered if it was a affectation of caffeine addiction. Perhaps it has to do with Colombian exports. I’ve seen similar obsessions in cocaine addicts. I think I’ll switch to Brazilian beans just to be safe.

Outside, the disabled car was still in the westbound lane. Thickening the snarl across the intersection, an accident, with the obligatory four police cars, was now blocking the eastbound lane.

A pedestrian’s dream. I jaywalked against the light, mentally thumbing my nose at the traffic and the police.

If it's Friday, I must be having e-mail trouble.

File this one under Merger-Mania. This week as part of the standardization after Verio's purchase of Hiway (where the site has been located) Verio changed the way the e-mail system works.

I called about the problems yesterday afternoon and the tech I spoke with apparently didn't have all the new information. The advice she gave me on reconfiguring the server was wrong. So I've gotten no mail at all since around noon yesterday and because of the bad advice yesterday, the tech I spoke with today is unsure if people who have sent mail since then were sent notifications that the mail didn't go through.

They've promised me everything's okay now and my tests have confirmed it, although it looked okay yesterday too, so I'm not sure I trust it yet.

So. If you've sent me mail in the past two or three days (just to be on the safe side), please re-send it. Thanks.


The past couple of days I’ve spent looking for apartments and spending a lot of time at Moonbeans while the landlord shows this one. On the subject of Moonbeans, I’ve been told the Tuesday entry was very sarcastic. I intended it as an observational humor piece and I was laughing the whole time I wrote it. Did it come across differently than I intended?

Anyway, I have several apartments to look at over the weekend. Due to economics, I’m downsizing so I’m looking at studios again. On the one hand, the extra space of a one-bedroom is nice, but on the other hand, I have three rooms to keep clean and I like to read propped up in bed, but the stereo is in the living room. Economically, I’ll be able to move, pay the security deposit and the June rent on a new place even if I don’t find a job by then.

I hope the landlord has this place rented. This going out for coffee is getting old, and expensive. She showed it to some guy for the second time today, (at a higher rent than I’m paying). He wanted to take some measurements, so it sounds good. I ran into my downstairs neighbor, Juanita, while we were doing laundry. She confirmed she’s moving at the end of May too. She’s giving her notice on Monday. I can just hear the landlord griping about having to run another ad and show her place. Hehehe.


I’ve also been doing some more background maintenance on the site. Geek stuff. In February I learned how to do “server-side includes”, which let you re-cycle parts of files in multiple pages. I finished up changing over my part of the site earlier in the month. This week I attacked Willie’s and Jeffrey’s sites.

None of it was really necessary since both sites worked fine to begin with. Any changes visible to the visitor are so subtle they verge on the unnoticeable. But when I have to add pages or make changes to their sites, I’ll save a lot of time and hassle.

Willie wanted navigation links at the bottom of every page and I'd hand-coded them. Which of course means that every page in his site needed to be changed every time a new page was added. He hasn't added any pages in a long time, but I'm hoping he will soon. When he does I only have to make manual changes to his home page and to a single menu file.

Jeffrey's site is frames-based. But not all browsers support frames and not all visitors like them, so there's a frameless version as well, (which should be your choice if you use 640x480 resolution, no matter what browser you use). He sometimes makes changes to things he's written, so every time he'd change a word or a comma, I had to change two sites.