Why do I love you so?

Because you are so pretty to look at?

at jo's: sip it with the Times and a round of chess

at jo's: sweeten it (no!) or drink it plain

at jo's: outside, on a summer afternoon

I did the bold thing today. I bought my first latte at Jo’s. Jo’s Tazzina is the closest café to the apartment I’ll be moving to (in the Bassett ‘hood) and in a month or so, it will be my place of choice for a latte.

I have been reluctant to try a cup thus far. What if I hated it, what if the barista was without brewing brains? What if it just did not measure up?

But it did. And oh, are the colors good for camerawork!

[Tonya, I am like an unleashed animal around a latte - I cannot help myself with the camera. Ocean is but a vessel for my coffee-posting crazies.]

Left to die

Being a post-war baby in Poland can really cause you to enter the world not kicking and screaming, but coughing and gasping. I was not a healthy little number. By age two (and I mean 2 days), I seem to have been pegged as the one who couldn’t stomach life. By the next two (months this time), I managed to develop the dreaded pneumonia which, without antibiotics, and when added to the fact that I was not eating, was pretty much the kiss of death.

My mother likes to recount this as one hopeless situation. So what did she do? She took me to the village, left me with my grandparents and went back to work in the city (after all, she had one healthy one gurgling in the play pen already).

I have to believe that she shed many a tear, expecting (as she tells it) a little wooden coffin with the limp body of her baby, whom she had barely named some weeks earlier, there - waiting for her upon her next return to the village (they had no phones back then).

I always think that story, which is supposed to be ultimately upbeat (what do you know! On the strength of milk squeezed straight from the cow’s warm udder, you pulled through! -- I am told), is maybe a sign that abandonment works in my favor. True, I was not really abandoned, but I certainly was left to…well, die, actually (if I am to believe my mother’s chipper-ish choice of words).

So if you ditch me for one reason or another – I will surprise you and I will thrive. Fresh warm milk -- organic maybe? -- is all it takes. That is the most obvious conclusion to draw from this. It is, however, not the correct conclusion.

Where there’s a will there’s a way; where there’s no will there’s no way.

Sometime in the last 24 hours I realized that I have too much on my plate right now. Which then caused me to ‘fess up to myself that I am one basket case. And I have run out of steam. Normally, under such circumstances I am one to push the balls to the wall. I cut to the chase, go the extra mile and get things done. No lollygagging for me.

But it’s different now and I am making no bones about it. Each day this month I have been running like a chicken with its head cut off. Until now. Instead of putting the pedal to the metal, I am sitting here stumped and I know I’ll stay here thus til the cows come home. And I don’t even have cows.