Left the confines of the condo for the soothing sound of jazz mixed with kitchen noises and the drone of constant typing here at Panera. Found out that there's actually lots of people "working from home," just like me. I feel like I've discovered a new species, and I shall name it "aeris tela," under the genus homo laboris, of the hominidae family. They are most readily found congregating around their main sources of sustenance, namely coffee and free wifi. I came here for the second, I've been free from coffee for years. But they have good sandwiches here, so that's nice.

I look around and wonder which ones will soon be back on the train to office land, and which ones are lifers here. I know which group I fall in. I wouldn't mind being a lifer one day, if I can find a way. Therein lies the rub.

There's obviously different classifications within the species, sub-species if you will. There's the a few Mac-ers around, I suspect if I ever find my way here for good, I'll join their ranks. They look like the artsy, trendy folk. But I'll just have to suffer that fate, I guess. Then there's the group I currently fall into - the business Dells. We're in straight-up office mode, we've got stacks of important looking papers and our cell phones are out and we're here to Get Things Done. Right. There are some business IBMers - black, boxy looking things. We disdain them. And we fear our company may try to give us one if our Dell breaks. And then there's the students, identified by their hoodies, hung-over expressions, and often the stickers on their varying machines. We all had a sticker on our machine at one point, I suppose. Here's what I had plastered across the middle of mine.

I submitted the last post to a cool new mag, both in print and on the web - Relevant Magazine (read: the mag is in print and on the web, I only submitted the article to the web version...I think). I feel I could have gotten a lot more mileage out of it as an article, but in retrospect I'm thinking maybe I could turn it into a three part series. I'll wait to see if they ever use the first one, then if they do I can guilt them into doing the second two. I'm thinking I should go back and find some of my past theology postings and see if they can be built into decent articles for submission. Lately I've been using Christian Carnival's deadline (Tues @ midnight) as my volition to bang out some real thinking at least once a week (well, not every week, but I'm getting back on the horse). If I could get some kind of regular deadline with Relevant, even with no guarantee of print, maybe I would actually have the motivation to write-edit-re-write something worthy of reading. We shall see.

Speaking of Christian Carnival, I tried to check the post today, which can be found here, but only got this:




Funny. Guess that shows you something of Panera's corporate stance on religion. But I still must give them a shout-out for giving me connectivity all afternoon.

Had what I think is perhaps my 2nd or 3rd Firefox pop-up, ever, and it looked like this:




I'm definitely running the most recent version. I guess the guys at Mozilla (God bless them and make them even more fruitful, and give them the cattle on a thousand hills, and whatnot) are having trouble keeping up with the seeping black evil that creates popup and spam code. The evil that shall not be named. I don't think it has a name, but if it did, we certainly wouldn't name it.

There's a baby wailing out front. The sounds of the outside world, trying to get into our warm, safe little conclave. The mommies are out there, and they are pushing their strollers. We're all huddled near the back of the long cafe, with a few brave souls on the leather chairs in the mid-section, near the registers and pastries. There's a reason for that - the signal is stronger in the back - must be where they have their router. Like a foolish young pup - new to the pack, I thought I could boldly sit at the high tables in the very front - provide myself with some sunshine through the large windows. The weak signal quickly sent me snivelling back into the den with the rest of the pack. And with a tenure of a full 6 hours under my belt, I am ready to assume the new alpha male status of this pack.

Who do I have to challenge?

Speaking of Grey Wolves, did you know that they are believed to remain mated for life upon choosing their first? Interesting.

And just like that, its quiet again. F-mezzo sax and silverware clinging. Shot in the dark that its an F-mezzo, but I might be right. Speaking of F-mezzo, did you know that they F-mezzo was only made between 1928 and 1930? So I'd imagine they're hard to find. No idea why they don't make them anymore...guess that just wouldn't be authentic? Or perhaps there was a congressional prohibition. They were into that kind of thing back in those days.

I'll be back here tomorrow, and hopefully have an even more productive day than I did today, which wasn't half bad, before it turned into wolves and saxophones. I even did some networking.