January 3, 2024
I woke up at 4:30 AM, brushed my teeth, and sipped some cup of hot coffee while writing in my journal. We left the house at 6:30 AM to go walking at Lake Wilson, arriving just as the sky lit up.
It was another beautiful sunrise, and we were back at it. Even though my wife and I had to work, we made time for the trip and a four-mile walk before our workday began. This morning, we saw the usual suspects, several blue herons, a large flock of Canadian geese, Mallard ducks, and squirrels. Alongside the bank, in the brushy trees, cardinals and wrens darted about. It was 29 degrees, but I felt warm as my body had acclimatized to the winter temperatures.
During my lunch break, I drove into Nash County and stopped by a small coffee shop named Cordiform Coffee. Cordiform has the best coffee in the area and has become my coffee shop of choice ever since my vengeful ban on Starbucks. After seeing Starbucks’ steady decline in the quality of their coffee and service, and after spending what I calculated to be thousands of dollars over time, the last straw finally broke during a visit I made about three months ago.
On that fateful day, I parked my car in the Starbucks lot, walked inside, and attempted to order a coffee when the barista told me the register at the front was closed. He then informed me that to get a coffee, I needed to order from my car at the drive-through window, pay for and receive my coffee, park back where I was parked then, and then I was “welcome to come back in and drink my coffee”.
As he was talking, I mentally measured the distance between the front register and the drive-through window. It was about twelve feet. It never occurred to the gentlemen that he could ring me up on the other register, and that was because Starbucks would not allow it, because of their strict controls on drive-though sales monitoring. I smiled politely and said, “Thank you”, and walked out of a Starbucks for the last time in my life.
I work from home via a laptop computer, which this afternoon, I took outside to the back porch for the last two hours of work, while sitting in front of my Solo Stove. Working out in the elements with a wood fire was a liberating experience. I was happy and productive, knocking several tasks off my list as crows cawed in the forest behind me and a flock of honking geese echoed overhead.
After work, I ran a couple of errands, one in Wilson and one in Bailey, to get some supplies for the evening. My wife worked late, so I visited the Piggly Wiggly to pick up a ribeye steak. I gave in to temptation while waiting in line and added a bag of bacon jerky to my purchase. Bacon jerky is a delicacy I recently discovered while at Papa Jack’s, a small gas station in Kenly.
I also stopped by a liquor store and picked up a bottle of Cook’s Mill American Straight Bourbon Whiskey. Winter nights are a great time to sip whiskey, and I enjoy trying local spirits. They named the distillery after the Cook’s Mill, which was a pre-revolutionary grist mill in Alamance County, the center of the Regulator Movement and Battle of Alamance.
As I was driving home, my thoughts turned to how much my life changed since leaving Texas. Just before the Covid pandemic, I was driving a little red sports car with red leather seats that barely held over two people, had a metropolitan set up for writing, including a Remarkable e-ink tablet, two Freewrite e-ink typewriters, and gear to get me through a train commute from a city near my Texas home to the government office where I worked. It was all so modern and slick.
Since then, I sold my Remarkable tablet, preferring a real pen and paper, and I sold my Freewrite machines. When I arrived home, still thinking about how my life changed, I did a quick inventory of my vehicle while grabbing my groceries. The rear seats on the SUV were all folded down, and I had filled the rear compartment with my Yeti fishing bucket, three fishing rods, five bags of deer corn, archery targets, firewood, one ribeye, a bottle of whiskey, and a bag of bacon jerky. I’d say that’s a transformation from my previous self. Most significant, however, is that who I was before felt less “me” than who I am now.