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Last week I borrowed a book from Dymphie that I'd heard about sometime last year. I'd been meaning to read it ever since.
How Starbucks saved my life, by Michael Gates Gill.
Despite initial impressions this is not a book about some stockbroker or sysadmin that lives off of Starbucks' coffee exclusively. It's not about people who need coffee to get through their days unscathed. Nope...
To sum it all up, Mr Gill used to be a big shot exec in the New York marketing world. After a few bad choices in life and a few nasty turns in his luck he finds himself destitute and alone in the world. Now job, no clients, no wife and his kids moved away as well. Despite his upper class upbringing and his snobbish life so far, Mr Gill accepted a position at Starbucks after his sixtieth birthday. Getting by on low wages, doing menial jobs and serving people Mr Gill found more satisfaction than he'd ever had in his exec job.
Despite the rather bad dutch translation I sped through the book in about five hours. It really isn't that big of a read and it's nicely paced.
The reason why I wanted to read this book in the first place is that I've always had something stuck in the back of my head:
things can always go wrong. It's very unlikely to happen, but there's always the off chance that something happens that prevents me from working in IT ever again. I dunno; maybe I develop a Linux allergy. ^_^; I've always told myself that, should it ever come so far, I'd never balk at menial jobs. I'd go flip burgers, work at a super market and in the evenings I'd clean offices. Sure, I wouldn't be able to do hard physical labour, but cleaning and cooking is definitely not below me.
An interview with Mr Gill is
available on YouTube.
Posted in:
bankrupt
,
coffee
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new start
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starbucks
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I am Starbucks-lexic. My brain can't retain words from Starbucks menus for more than a few seconds. It's the same black hole sports terms go and it's as annoying as heck.
The first problem is the tall-grande-venti-hula-moogoogaipan size scheme. Total nonsense. I'd like a small, medium, large, and Big Gulp. Then they have latte, cafe, espresso, americano, macchiato, and mocha-hou-hou.
I can't order "a large vanilla iced coffee," because believe me, I have tried! I get a response that sounds like mock Italian.
"You want an ice minty mecka-lekka hai mecka hini ho?"
"Sure..." and then I get a shoe with cheese on it.
-----
Sent from my iPhone
Posted in:
coffee
,
starbuck
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The coffee machine is broke at work again. This sucks, since I have a 8-day sinus headache, I only slept 4 hours last night, and coffee is what keeps me going. I finally broke down and got a cup of coffee at the Korean deli downstairs, which was just awful. Weak, bitter, and it just hurts my stomach. There are two Starbucks close to here, and a Caribou Coffee, but I don't want to have to walk 2 blocks in the morning to walk back to work with coffee that is no longer hot. I may need to get one of those bullet-shaped hyper-Thermoses and make coffee at home if this keeps up.
Man, never used to drink coffee. What happened? Damn you, Sweden!!
In other news, apart from failing to get an iPhone (I think I'll wait until next week until the lines get shorter), I did some more yard work this weekend. After I had cleaned up a lot of the tree waste those cutters left behind, I decided to keep up with the pruning and cleanup. It was hot. I hate working in hot, sweaty, weather because I always gain weight for some reason. I think it's all the water I drink. But anyway, I pruned the hell out of the front yard near my door and one of the rec room windows. It's funny, when you cut down what looks like half an acre of brush, if you make you cuttings short (only a foot or less), you don't generate a whole of of trash bags like you do with, say, leaf litter. When I was done with all the tree debris and the cuttings of various dead branches, and a dozen bushes, I only filled four 45 gallon trash bags. I could have packed them in tighter, but I found out the "heavy duty yard waste" bags I got at Home Depot were weak and easily punctured. I also cleaned up a lot of assorted debris around my house, including some roof repair trash that the original workers left behind.
Then I went and saw WALL-E, which was as good as everyone had led me to believe. Man, I shed a few tears during some scenes. Very well done. A masterpiece. The short in the beginning with the magician's rabbit was also very good, and I think was almost an homage to Chuck Jones.
CR becomes a legal adult in less than a week. Isn't that something?
Posted in:
coffee
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wall-e
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work
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Coffee, black, two sugars (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach
Well, this is a remarkable change: I've started drinking my coffee black, without cream. I used to be a cream or cappuccino guy and I still like that stuff. It's just that, by accident, I learnt that I also love coffee without cream.
A few days ago, instead of punching 1-4-4 to get my regular coffee-complete-mocca, I did a 1-3-4. As I started sipping my drink I noticed something was different, but I didn't know what. Somehow the coffee's flavour was much fuller than usual :)
Well, now I know. And to think that three years ago I still hated this stuff.
Posted in:
black
,
coffee
,
no cream
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1. I love living in Utrecht for many good reasons. One of them's the scent of coffee that permeates the morning air when I ride my bike to the train station. One of the little perks of living in the city of
Douwe Egberts' breweries.
2. I love
Blackie and her built-in clock. She never fails to wake me at an acceptable time, if I've overslept. Usually my alarm clock goes around six and she starts scratching the doors and meowing loudly at seven, but only if I'm not up yet. Now that's what I call a wake-up service ^_^
Posted in:
bike
,
cat
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coffee
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mornings
,
wake up
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I have a new LJ Icon based on the latest rabid-Christian handout for Halloween this year. Not Christian, rabid-Christian. These are the people who got infected with a brain-altering disease of the mind who try to infect others with their hate.
Warning: this site might be offensive if you take these people seriously. Most Christians do not, and shake their head in embarrassment the same way Wiccans do when some teenager decides to be a witch to piss off her parents.
http://objectiveministries.org/kidz/"Hopsiah the Kanga-Jew?" Prayah, please...
Posted in:
bad mood
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coffee
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halloween
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handout
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icon
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livejournal
,
religion
,
where's the candy?
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By Caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking is a warning. By Caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.Jesus Christ, I am exhausted. I am running on maybe 90 minutes of sleep. The reasons behind this are basically my finances, as skimmed before in a previous entry, behind. Part of my problem stemmed from the fact I sent out some checks that were sent back because the postage rates changed and the post office returned a few bills as "postage due" for a whopping 2 cents. I have some of my bills paid online automatically, but not all of them have this feature, or they want unfettered access to my checking account and automatically withdrawing at their whim, which I find very risky at best. I had a friend who got reamed by Vepco, for instance, when a slip of a decimal point made his $83.20 bill drain his bank account with an $832.00 charge (this was later fixed, but he bounced a lot of checks that month). But the end result for me is late fees upon late fees. And the IRS claiming I owe them money (I have to find my 2005 taxes, which should be in a neat envelope). I haven't balanced my checkbook, either, because by 4am, my brain was too fried to do math. Sadly, it's too fried now to do math, but at least I got checks out this morning. I still have to balance my statements, find my 2005 Taxes, and try and find money for next month.
Sadly, a casualty of this is that TCEP is most likely not doable. This is CR's graduating year, and we have photos and stuff to get, plus his school supplies, clothes, and the usual back-to-school stuff.
I'd drink more coffee, but after 2 cups, my stomach goes sour and I get jittery. I even ate breakfast when I got to work (which I rarely do), and that didn't wake me up, either. My best hope is to drink a lot of water, a trick I learned back with FanTek security, when we realized that sometimes, your tiredness was beyond coffee, and it started to work in the opposite way (or gave you a headache and nosebleeds).
Posted in:
caffeine
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coffee
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finances
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money
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sleepy
,
tcep
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Holymoly... If you _ever_ wanted to know what it'd be like to be interviewed by a young girl with the attention span of a ferret on crack, watch
this Winterview interview with R. Stevens.
Yes, he's the same Diesel Sweeties guy I talked about a few days ago... But this time around the cute yet hyper-hyped-up-hyper girl interviewing him is the subject :D She's silly.
Posted in:
coffee
,
dieselsweeties.com
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dumbrella
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r. stevens