Metro Cafe Barista drinks coffee at Kaladi Brothers

Shocked! I am certain many of my regular readers are just simply shocked! Kristina! Barista at Metro Cafe! How could you? For that matter, how could I? I went in to Kaladi Brothers to get me a coffee today along with another to bring home to Margie and there was Kristina, drinking a Kaladi Brothers coffee. Kristina was not being disloyal. Neither was I. Carmen keeps Metro Cafe closed on Sundays. We had to get our coffee somewhere. Kaladi Brothers is the second best coffee shop in Wasilla and was a good choice. Plus, Kristina had a paper to do for a class. She finds a coffee shop a better place to work than home. She said she was putting 10 hours in on that paper. 

Text added at 5:56 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 50 and counting.

Saint Branson

I believe I have mentioned in the past that Branson attends Catholic school. If I didn't, well he does. And as it happened, at some school function he was awarded the role of a certain saint. Carmen could not remember which saint.

To me, the answer was easy: Saint Branson! 

Well, look - it says right there in Carmen's picture - St. Ferdinand.

Text added at 4:46 PM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 45 and counting.

Faith has grown into a young woman and her beautiful cat has left this world

At Metro Cafe, I pulled out of the drive through and stepped inside for a change. I hadn't been in there but a minute or so when this young woman pulled up to the window. She smiled and said, "Bill Hess!" I had no idea who she was, but there was something familiar about her. "You photographed my cat," she said. I photograph a lot of cats, all over. I could not place her. Finally, I quit trying to picture the person sitting in front of me and tried instead to picture a young girl, I've been doing this for a long time. Then I remembered. About 10 years ago I did photograph her and her beautiful cat at her childhood home in Barrow. The cat has since passed on. Faith now lives in Wasilla and in August married the son of some friends of mine from Barrow. Her husband's mother contacted me before the wedding and badly wanted me to come and take pictures, but I had a job I was committed to in Nuiqsut. Offhand, I forget the name of the cat, but it occupies some space in my as of yet unpublished and still growing book about Alaska cats. Someday, you can read the name of cat in there and learn about its life and about how much Faith loved it. You will see it was a very beautiful cat, born with an internal defect and it lived much longer than it was expected to. 

 Barista Kristina - always pleasant. She has never skied before, but today she told me she now has skis and will soon be skiing.

The Squarespace nightmare continues unabated but I decided I wanted to post this picture anyway and did it completely the old fashioned, tedious, time-consuming, Squarespace 5 way, which is inefficient but still works.

The remaining 50% of my social activity for this day

This morning, I posted a pic from Abby's Home Cooking and speculated that my human interaction there would constitute 50% of my social activities for the entire day. I postulated the other 50 percent would take place at the drive-through window of Metro Cafe. That is exactly how it worked out – but it turned into a much bigger deal than I had anticipated. Kristina greeted me at the Metro window and then Carmen with her Aunt Felis, sister to her mother and her Uncle Paco. I had never met them before. I would relate their life history to you, but I had to move along so the next customer could pull up to the window. Hence, I did not get a chance to learn their history.

Coffee break time

Evalina, Metro Cafe. Now I will drive home and drink my coffee as I go. I won't go the long way, because I've already been to Anchorage and back today.

Note, 5:05 PM: To any readers who may have checked into this blog in the past 50 minutes only to see very strange things, like this post repeated multiple times but with no image included, or to see one, two, or three empty posts, all titled "Y," I apologize but also put the blame squarely upon my blog host, Squarespace. I will not bother to explain, only to note that, using the app, I tried to post the full post multiple times and each time Squarespace failed and mucked it up.

Honestly, this Squarespace app is far and away the worst app I have dealt with. More often than not, it fails one, two, or three times before it succeeds. Sometimes, when it fails, it posts nothing. Sometimes, it posts the text with no picture. Sometimes, a single attempt will result in two separate posts of the same text, each with no picture. 

This time, I must have tried at least 15 times and it failed every time and never uploaded the picture even once, although it did sometimes upload text and sometimes not. I could not complete the post with the image included until I returned home and did so the old fashioned way.

SQUARESPACE!!!!!!!