I am just returning to my blog after a very extended holiday season. As WordPress has been very good about informing us and as many seasoned bloggers already know, if you want your blog to be seen you have to blog…often. I have broken this cardinal rule and I must now pick up the pieces.
For awhile I was blogging everyday and then I went home to Minnesota for the holidays and all my good habits vanished. I woke up late, spent my days lounging with family and friends and completely neglected my website. When I returned home to Portland, I spent my time focusing on my work. Though that should have included keeping my website fresh, it didn’t. I return to it now with due diligence. I hope my viewers, few as they may have been, will not begrudge me my absence and continue to visit my site.
Good afternoon, good evening and good night.
Amber
Sphere, the new name for AOL News, has published an article about the dangers of diacetyl, a chemical used in artificial butter flavoring that has been linked to the deaths of hundreds, and lung failure in others, who are either exposed to the chemical from working with it or from a microwave popcorn addiction, “Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Make Popcorn.”
I suppose typos could be deadly, but no such instances come to mind. We may question the lethality of typos, but we cannot question their frequent occurrence in news stories:
In a report made public last week, NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] said that investigators found concentrations of butter flavoring agent 2,3-pentanedione in liquid buttermilk flavoring and during production of a bakery mixes.
Delete the letter “a” and you’ve got a respectable paragraph, ladies and gentlemen.
For some reason I do my best writing in coffee shops. I have noticed that I am most productive and energetic in such spaces. I’m sure a lot of that has to do with the coffee and the sugar, but it just feels so good to be out in public, as opposed to cocooned in my office at home, while in my head at the same time.
I wasn’t a big coffee drinker until I fell in with a group of coffee-obsessed hippies in Eugene, OR. Every Friday from 4-7pm we would meet at a local coffee shop called The Wandering Goat for their free shots of espresso. Being a novice coffee drinker, I stuck to the basics: latte with cow milk, sweetened with raw sugar. It was delicious. And the company was energizing, intellectual, and comfortable. As soon as the gathering was over I would look forward to the next week. That’s how I got hooked on coffee…and coffee shops.
After that group of friends scattered to various corners of the world, coffee shops continued to be places of comfort and refuge for me. They reminded me of good times and good tastes. I started to frequent them solo and bring books, my laptop, and my writerly brain with me. I now write for myself and for my clients while sipping perfectly brewed coffee in coffee shops. I don’t have a favorite shop in Portland yet, but as long as the coffee is good, the atmosphere is welcoming, and I have a view of outside, I am absolutely content.
This song by Landon Pigg comes to mind when I think about the connection writing seems to have with coffee and coffee shops, the symbiotic relationship. There’s something inspiring about the peace and the bustle of a coffee shop…I don’t know how else to explain it…
Does any writer out there have an explanation for why coffee shops are so conducive to creating? I would love to have further insight on this. 
Why do you have to press the SHIFT button and then the question mark to get a question mark? Surely the question mark is used more often than the backslash. I have no empirical evidence to prove this, but if most people use a keyboard the same way I do (to post on their blogs, cruise the Internet via Google, and compose) then it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever why the use of the question mark is a two step process unlike the period or the comma.
While writing an essay the night before it was due, in her frustration, my college roommate vented about having to press SHIFT before being able to get a question mark and asked the question above (with various expletives that I have omitted). I never really thought about it until then, and now, six years later, I think I have part of the answer to her question.
Because it was originally a tool used by the Army. The Internet was created in 1969 by a U.S. government agency called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to communicate with themselves. Very likely there was a lot of code writing involved, i.e. high usage of backslashes, dashes, and periods, and minimal usage of the question mark. (This is all a hypothesis, keep in mind, so if anyone has additional information to contribute that would be wonderful.)
It was only in 1990 that researchers realized they could use the Internet to connect a web of stored hypertext pages and make them accessible to people all over the world. Enter the World Wide Web (www). By the time this all came about, however, the keyboard was already created and the question mark, though used more often than the backslash, was already relegated to a second tier spot.
This rumination was forged in the mind of a copywriter.
