Please Pass the Salt

Yesterday, we went to a friends house and roasted coffee, 

enjoyed the beautiful evening, and looked at the moon through a telescope.

We’ve also been gardening.  Here’s a picture of the whole garden:

Here’s a picture of the delicious lettuce Matt grew:

And our darling “senior” dog Sadie, in an effort to do something puppy-like and cute, hid halfway under the bed the other day.  Just her front half.  When we called her name, she pretended she was invisible in her half-hiding place.  She did this for an entire hour.  After awhile, we started to wonder if she was ok under the bed.  It turned out she was stuck and we had to lift up the bed to free her.  Under the bed used to be her favorite special hang out spot.  Guess she forgot how to crawl out from under it.

There is a coffee shop next door to the main library on campus called Poor Yorick’s, which I frequented a lot as a grad student.  It was halfway between all three places on campus I had to be: chemistry building, the electron microscopes, and the freshman chemistry teaching labs.  Early on during grad school, I would get coffee with classmates in between our classes and the labs we taught.  When I was no longer teaching labs, a friend and I used to eat our lunches at the little tables outside the library/coffee shop in the shade.  And then when I was dating my husband, we would meet for coffee at random times of the day when he was still a student and drink espresso together outside. 

Here is a picture of the oh-so-romantic concrete wall we would sit together on…me going crazy from grad school stress; him relating a story about smashing his head open on a doorway and bleeding everywhere, or another tale of no one ever wanting to sit by him in class, or being hit while riding his bike on campus by a girl whose response was “Sorry!  I was eating my ice cream!” or the legitimate debate-ending comment to him during a class discussion “You wouldn’t understand because you’re not a girl.”  Oh, the good old days…  The coffee was cheap and shockingly good.  They even had cinnamon flavored syrup to add to your beverage…and not the cinnamon roll kind, but the spicy cinnamon chewing gum kind.  Apparently that has gone by the wayside at all coffee shops I’ve been to in the last few years…

This summer, Poor Yorick’s got a makeover, presumably because it was always so crowded and needed expansion.  But now that I’ve been inside, I think it was to keep up with the changing times of technology and learning.  Poor Yorick’s is now totally open to and connected with the library.  It is gigantic with a really artsy-looking coffee bar and lots of seating, complete with plugs for your laptop, etc and everyone in there is studying in the new, not-so-quiet, need three electronic devices going at once, way.  It’s like a Starbucks.  In fact, the whole first floor of the library (which I’m guessing is no longer a quiet zone) looks like a ritzy coffee shop.  Even the library’s main desk looks like it belongs in a coffee shop.  I guess learning now happens in a social, WiFi-connected environment with lovely wood flooring and chic light fixtures. 

It really looks quite lovely and had I not been going to the coffee shop for six years and didn’t have memories of the daily grind of my life at that time connected with its former look, I would really like it.  Also, somehow the baristas are much slower now.