We watched a movie this weekend called The Ugly Dachshund; okay, we started watching it and then i fell asleep and Kevin decided to play a video game but anyway, it was a lovely little movie starring a lovely young Suzanne Pleshette about a Great Dane who was having an identity crisis thanks to having been raised with Suzanne's prissy little Dachshund puppies. I felt for that Great Dane, because we have a little identity crisis going on in our own home.
See, Vivi seems to think she is a dog. Strange cat comes near the house? War cry, growling and general house guarding. She runs to the door to see you when you come home, she refuses to sleep during the day if you are home, and she loves cheese. Well, she loves everything really; if you drop something, she'll eat it.
But here's the kicker: Vivianne the Cat likes to play fetch. She has a toy that is her baby, which she will lovingly take into her bed at night or bring to us in the morning, begging us to play with her. It's the absolute only one she will fetch with, but she'll fetch for 20 minutes at a time when she's in the right mood. She broke her original one a couple months ago and we had to replace it (it's a Panic Mouse attachment) and we figured that she would have forgotten the whole fetching thing by now. It arrived this weekend and within 24 hours, she was dragging it up onto the bed to wake us up and ask for us to throw it.
As proof, I offer this video. I showed it to my friend Leslie and she immediately said "Well, she fetches better than Latte does!" (Latte being her 6 month old puppy) It's kind of dark since for some reason it gets darker when you upload it anywhere, but you can see what's going on there.
Remember that story that was in all the papers a few years back, the one about the woman who got the kidney from her barista at Starbucks? It sounded kind of crazy at the time; it was basically handing over an organ to a stranger, right? I mean, you have to be some kind of hero to want to do that.
But then a Starbucks opened up near my apartment, a Starbucks that was within walking distance and kind of on my way to work. So I started going there a little more often. I went there often enough that one of the baristas noticed that I was losing weight after my surgery, and a couple of them started recognizing my pink travel cup and remembering what I drink. But I had a job that demanded that I be there on time and usually I preferred to sleep in rather than get up early enough to stop and get some coffee so I was an occasional visitor rather than a regular.
Until this summer.
Because this summer I got a job with a new company and this new job? Doesn't have a set start time. I tend to get there sometime between 8:30 and 9 and still beat most everyone in; I do love a relaxed office environment. Of course, I also have a longer commute so I started stopping to grab some coffee at that Starbucks on the corner a little more often. And then a little more often became pretty much almost every day. Next thing I know, the baristas all know my name, one of them starts calling me Mel, and then whammo, I know all of their names too.
There's tall Cindy, who's always smily and never messes up my drink. And short Cindy, who doesn't work very often at that store and is pregnant. There's Megan and Amanda and Josh and Adam, and adorably young and chipper Sofia with the curly, curly hair who sings along with the Motown songs and talks with me about crafty stuff. And that's just my morning crew.
My afternoon/night time crew (who I see when I need a tea latte) is Devin and Dan and Mike the crazy musician dude and Gavin with the crazy hair, who is nice and a little wacky and who told me the other night that apparently, the baristas talk about me with each other. Now, I knew I had a little Starbucks addiction problem when they sent me a free Starbucks Gold card, but this? This is a sign of a true Problem.
I am at My Starbucks often enough that the baristas have been known to discuss me and how nice I am when I come in (at least according to Gavin, who thanked me for helping him fix my drink the other night). I have to wonder how horrible other customers must be to them when a customer who shows them some common courtesy and a smile makes an impression. But I have to admit I kind of love the fact that 75% of the time I don't need to tell them my drink order because they all know it.
And now I understand how that barista was able to give up her kidney to a customer, because they weren't strangers after all. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go grab a latte.
When Kevin and I got married back in 2006, the part we looked forward to most (other than the presents) (HA I AM JOKING) was our honeymoon. A week away from everyone and everything, ensconced in a resort next to the Pacific in Costa Rica; it was exactly what we needed after all the stress and family drama and general craziness that accompanies planning a wedding.
And it was everything we could have possibly wanted. Sleep in, have a late breakfast, go for a swim, have a nap, have lunch, go for a swim, have a nap, have a romantic dinner next to the ocean. Lather, rinse, repeat. Amazingly, I still managed to take about 120 pictures despite all the napping and relaxing. I came home, downloaded them to our computer with the intention of printing them for an album that summer, and then went about my business.
And then we got robbed (sidenote: please notice we are STILL HERE in the same apartment). But the pictures hadn't been printed so they were gone, along with the rest of the pictures I'd downloaded over the past two years (Because WE ARE DUMB and do not have an external hard drive to back things up to. Yet. Still. See? DUMB.) Luckily I had uploaded a few to Flickr, so I consoled myself with those and made a small album out of them.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. Mom calls, and asks about my honeymoon pictures and what they might look like because she just found a mystery folder of pictures that looked like they might be our honeymoon pictures....on her computer. At her house. Far away from my cameras or our burglers. And as we talked, the two of us suddenly remembered that when we got home from the honeymoon, I had downloaded the pictures to her computer to make it easier to show them to everyone that was at the house! And they were all still there!
So 2 1/2 years after they disappeared, our honeymoon pictures have come home, all 120 of them Who says there's no such thing as miracles?
