This is not a riddle. Well, I suppose it could be a riddle, but I’m asking it as an honest question. What name can be spelled only one way? I need to know because of Starbucks. Yes, Starbucks.

I circulate among several coffee shops in the Chapel Hill area to do my freelance work because I don’t want to get sick of any one place or any one background soundtrack. I sometimes visit the Starbucks and they always ask your name so they can write it on your cup in thick black permanent marker. One of the few constants in my thirty-plus years on this Earth is that no one ever knows how to spell my name. I like my name, (great job Mom and Dad!) but I spell it a bit oddly (not so great job, Mom and Dad!). Misspellings used to annoy me all through high school, but by the time I reached college I either chilled out about it or admitted defeat and let it go. My linguistics teacher always said spelling doesn’t [...]

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Photo by CairnsDining / by BY-NC-SA 2.0

Actually, I’ve become a coffee shop john if we’re going to make the prostitution analogy correctly. I’m the one paying, after all. I’ve been freelancing full-time for 21 months now. (And I’m still not broke! I know, I’m as shocked as you are.) As nice as it is to sleep late, take vacation days without need of approval, and to crash on the couch in the afternoon if my headache has my brain in a headlock, it can get lonely if you let it. Hypothetically, if I had enough groceries I could stay in my apartment for days, if not weeks, at a time. That’s great if there is a nuclear incident in my vicinity. All I’d have to do is duct tape the windows closed to protect myself from stray neutrons. But it can also get rather claustrophobic and boring no matter how many movies I can watch on Netflix streaming.

Lately I’ve been going to coffee shops to work. A lot. Like, way more than I ever did [...]

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“Today is going down as a huge turning point in my life,” my mother told me recently.

“Oh, why?” I asked hesitantly, trying to remember if today was her wedding anniversary, divorce anniversary or some other anniversary.

“They’ve discontinued my General Foods International Orange Cappuccino!” She wailed.

I cannot remember a time in my life when my mother did not drink the General Foods International Orange Cappuccino. There was always one or two of the small rectangular tins on our kitchen counter, one full of the instant coffee mix and one containing drained grease. The tins were metal and wouldn’t melt when hot liquid grease was poured into them after cooking.

But now, just like my lamented Strawberry Shredded Wheat, the Orange Cappuccino is missing from the shelves of Target, Kroger and Meijer. When I visited the General Foods web site, they have a listing for Orange Spice Latte in the place of the the old Orange Cappuccino page. According to comments on this page, the Orange Spice Latte flavor does not taste the same.

I wish they would warn [...]

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Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have wondered why I was conducting top secret oatmeal experiments last month. Wonder no more! As a part of the Quaker Oats Living Proof weekend I attended, Quaker challenged the attendees to come up with a new oatmeal recipe that met certain nutritional guidelines. The prize was an all-expense paid trip to Lafayette, Colorado for the 12th Annual Quaker Oatmeal Festival. That was great, but the part about free ski passes sounded more enticing. I love me some oatmeal, but the idea of the world’s largest topping bar isn’t quite enough motivation for me to conduct oatmeal experiments in my kitchen top secret lab. I decided 1 in 16 odds were pretty damn good for winning anything, so I started doing unholy things to instant oats.

I remembered that Quaker Oats is owned by the same company that makes Diet Pepsi as well as other products like Tropicana and Lays Potato Chips, as illustrated in this photo of the lobby above. (This photo also makes me think [...]

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Congrats to Dyan and Karen in Tally who were the winners of the Starbucks Gold Card giveaway! I am going to hold you to your promise, so Karen’s husband and that guy in line behind Dyan at the unemployment office had better get their 10% off a coffee. Or else…um, you’ll feel really bad for lying, won’t you?

Also, thanks to everyone who left feedback on yesterday’s entry. It was…interesting (just as I predicted). Looks like I drove off some people who probably shouldn’t have been hanging around here anyway. It’s good to shake down the blog every once in a while. It keeps the site minty fresh. And everyone who said “Oh, no, just say whatever you want to! It’s your blog!” after my defensive blogging post might now have a little insight as to why I laughed my ass off after reading that advice.

BTW, I also wanted to thank everyone who has clicked through on my Amazon links. I meant to thank you on Saturday in my “Elsewhere” entry, but I was too tired [...]

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