WE HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND IT IS. . .

Change is hard!  Everyone says so, and change has come to Panera Bread in the weeks we have been away.  The barista counter, where you could watch your smoothie or latte being made and chat a bit with the maker, has been blocked by a dark wall.  No more eye contact, no more friendly back and forth at this once happy spot.  Two of the four person booths, which seemed to have been pretty constantly in use, have been converted to two person booths to make room for a dark little nook containing a bench and a pile of baby chairs.   This new bench construction is again unfriendly to light.  The message here seems to be that Panera is becoming a darker place.  Finally, the wide and accommodating recycle/waste/silverware/tray bins, have been replaced with a garbage receptacle less than half the size of the original.  And this my friends is what has truly pissed us regulars off!  Why, you ask?

Why?  Because the comfortable trash containers we grew to know and love have been replaced by tables holding what look like miniature ATM’s installed in front of ballpark containers for scooping mustard, relish, and onions.  Now, we are told that in the near future, maybe June, these tables will become order kiosks, where you can step up to the little screen, order your bagel, pay for it, pick up a buzzer, and wait for it to buzz the arrival of your food.  I’m still not sure what the mustard/relish like installations are.  I guess the idea of this is to make it easier to order.  Maybe it will work.  I wonder, though.  The kiosk/table pictured above sits directly to the right of the place where people who wish to order from live people line up.  Another kiosk/table with a little garbage can next to it is directly to the left of the line up area.  Possible result:  kiosk lines bumping into regular order lines from both sides. . . creating Panera Mayhem.

Funny, true story:  On Sunday morning, I was going for coffee and a regular customer, I don’t know his name, but he is the man with the big hat and scarf, plopped his cup and tray down on the order kiosk-to-be.  Trying to be helpful, I said, “They’ve moved the garbage can over there.”  To which with red face the man said to me, “Then they can damn well move this over there, too!”  

I guess that little tale is symbolic of the difficulty of change.  For the Panera regulars, the philosophy would probably be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!  Maybe the kiosks are necessary to up the bottom line.  So be it.  They won’t disappear.  There’s a large investment in those unpopular facilities.  But the walls blocking the customers from the staff need to go down.  Come on, corporate, let the light back in!  Don’t you realize that a big reason that many of us regulars come to drink from the Panera Dark Roast Grail everyday is that we like the people who work there, and we like to interact with them.  It stinks to say good morning to a wall!--Greg Ellstrom

Panera and the I.R.S.

On Friday morning as I sat in Panera, I thought forward to that afternoon when we were to get our taxes done.  I wasn’t worrying.  Linda keeps copious records, and we have a terrific finance guy who knows all the ins and outs of the tax laws.  Still, tax time is time to think about your finances, and I got thinking about all the money I spend at Panera over the course of our personal fiscal year.  On Friday, I spent $3.62 for my coffee and bagel.  Now that’s a little low for a typical day, so I decided to go with $4.00 as a mean amount.  I don’t go to Panera everyday but I do go often so I decided to opt for 300 days of the year.  At 4 dollars per day for 300 days, I provide Panera with $1200 per year!  Holy $@^$&@$##!  

What if this figure somehow came up in the discussion with our financial guru?  How would I explain such an expenditure of funds?  I could say that Linda never has to buy anything for me for breakfast, which would be true.  But she still has to buy coffee and eggs and bread and the other foodstuffs that could go into my morning meal.  What I needed was a good solid tax dodge to give not only explanation but purpose to my Panera expenses.

My first thought was medical.  I could claim I need caffeine for my health.  Just this week a Blue Ribbon scientific/medical panel declared coffee, in fact 4 cups a day, as wonderful for a person’s physical well being.  Not only that, but another Blue Ribbon scientific/medical panel vowed that their studies proved that high cholesterol isn’t harmful at all.  What a great week for breakfast foods.  I saw in the findings of these two panels as a way to declare Dark Roast coffee and egg and cheese on cibatta bread as medications.  Not just medications, I might add, but PREVENTIVE medications!

Still, I worried.  I was pretty sure that before I could begin to make a case with the IRS, that two new Blue Ribbon panels would announce findings completely to the opposite of the ones I was using.  Also, everyone knows that for a medication to really make it into the pharmacoepia, it has to cause terrible diseases and conditions to other parts of the body, and those diseases and conditions have to be included in any commercial advertising the pharmaceutical.  That way, you can tell your doctor about them when you go see him or her to tell them just exactly what you want them to prescribe.  This would require so much research on my part and probably a lot of fabrication.  What to do?

Then an even better idea came to mind.  Somebody should pay me something for writing this blog, its impetus being my morning visits to Panera.  If I could get someone to pay me a few bucks--and send me a W-2--I could declare my Panera breakfast as business expenses.  This is not impossible.  I published a book online with Amazon this year.  It sold about 20 copies.  And Amazon sent me a W-2 for the miniscule amount I made.  So I have to find a corporate Sugar Daddy to jump on board.  Yes, indeed.  I will make that my goal for the months ahead.

I felt a lot better about my Panera expenditures, then.  But I do worry about using “IRS” in the title of this post.  With all the subtle tracking equipment the IRS employs to search the web, will some agent out there find my financial plans to be subversive to the intent of the tax code.  If so, then listen:  I’M KIDDING!  THIS IS A JOKE!  LOL!  DON”T TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, O.K.?  Thank you.  I hope IRS is one of those meta expressions.--Greg Ellstrom

Just a little posting as addendum to Stopping by Panera. . .

(This was originally the last paragraph of my weather posting.  I decided not to use it the first time to keep the weather posting positive.  Decided to do it now.)

I hate to close on a down note, but I have to think about how this strange weather the world is having is surely the product of “climate change.”  It scares me.  It scares me because we are doing so little about it.  Instead of taking action, I think the majority of us feel quiet despair about where our world is headed, and then put that despair aside, to go for a ride in our fossil fuel-mobiles to a coffee shop or somewhere else where we can smile and discuss other things.  When I step out into an icy blast, and say to myself, “Man, day after day, this is just too darn cold,” I must remind myself that, yes, it is colder than it’s supposed to be here. . . and hotter than it’s supposed to be other places, and drier than it’s supposed to be somewhere, and wetter than it’s supposed to be someplace.  Then I remind myself that mother nature must think this is the way it is supposed to be now, because, after all, we made it this way.  That’s what we must have wanted.--Greg Ellstrom

Hostess vs. Table Talk--Which Side Would You Be On?

It was Dale and the group of guys at Panera who inspired this entry to my blog.  Early this week they were having a glorious discussion at full volume about the greatness of remembered food, food consumed when we were younger and calories and cholesterol were of no concern.  Foods like Ho-ho’s, Twinkies, Dale’s favorite Table Talk pies in the little boxes, Hostess Cupcakes with the squiggle and the cream inside, Hostess Snowballs with the pink gooey icing and the cream inside, birch beer, french fries with cheese curds on top, and Hostess Pies that looked like empanadas.  The guys also were talking about memories of places like Heid’s and of food customs they recalled.  One guy claimed he had eaten 10 hot dogs in one sitting.  I empathized with one of them who said when he was a kid he never knew what a hamburger roll was.  His family always ate hamburgers tucked between two slices of white bread. (Probably “Wonder.”)

I remember those terrific treats from time gone by.  I still see the Twinkies and the Snowballs on the rack in Byrne Dairy, but I never buy them.  When my friends and I were around 10 years old there were two stores we could bike to buy treats.  The Pennysaver was a great store in the part of Webster called Forest Lawn,  (No relation to the cemetery of the same name), but my favorite store was Unger’s on Bay Road, an easy bike ride away, even though we had to ride on DeWitt Road and avoid the always dangerous Bay Road to get there.  Unger’s wasn’t very big, and it was run by an old couple.  It had all the snack foods, plus it was the place we went during baseball card season to buy packs of Topp’s bubble gum cards for a nickel apiece. We’d open them and pray for a special card.  I remember getting a “Hank Aaron” at Unger’s.  Wish I had it now. The store had a cooler for bottled soft drinks, which we called pop.  My favorite was Orange Crush back when it was the color of lemonade and came in brown bottles with orange letters.

That was a good time for food and drink.  Coke machines that vended 7 oz. bottles for 6 cents, the four-in-one Sky Bar, and those stupid little candy dots that were stuck in long rows to the strips of paper that looked like they belonged in an adding machine.  The worst, I thought were the wax bottles filled with room temperature liquified sugar.  Does anyone else remember Super Cola, a short lived soft drink that came in a metal bottle that looked like the containers they use for engine additives?

I repeat, that was a good time for food and drink.  I imagine everyone’s pasts feature the same kind of memories. Tasty.  And the best pies were definitely the “Table Talk” variety with the little foil pie tins!  That’s what I think anyway, and I know Dale agrees.

Greg Ellstrom

Stopping By Panera on a Frigid Morning

File Photo:  Our Driveway, Winter 2011

This has been said before, but I think it bears repeating.  People who live in Upstate New York are tough when the winter rolls around.  This morning it was negative 4 at our house, and the wind was whipping.  We only have a single car garage, and my car was in the garage, and Linda’s was out in a snowdrift.  Linda had to get to physical therapy so I went out and got her car out of the drift.  It wasn’t fun, but the only things that hurt when I came in were my fingertips.

I got to Panera, and the place was kind of quiet.  Still there were a bunch of people who weren’t about to let sub-zero wind chills prevent them from having their coffee in their usual spot and in their usual chairs.  Plenty of regulars were there:  Dale, Nick, Mary, Vicki, and Al to name a few.   Of course, when you first arrive and see people, the first thing you ask is, “how about this cold?” or some such question.   But then, rather remarkably, the weather stops being a topic.  From where I sat I heard people discussing internships and trips to Cape Cod.  I was involved in two short discussions, one about lacrosse and the other about Yellowstone Park.   People were smiling and apparently happy despite the record cold.  By the way, I checked the temperature in Denali State Park in Alaska today.  It was 41 degrees above zero.  That’s right above zero!  It’s about as cold here as it is anyplace on the habitable parts of the globe.  Maybe it’s the sunshine that keeps people smiling regardless of the shiver.  It has been sunny lately.  When I step outside into the bright sun and into a gust of frigid wind, I imagine that this is what it must be like on a summer day in Antarctica.  Look hard enough, and you can almost always find summer.--Greg Ellstrom

Coffee With Brian Williams (Not On a Helicopter)

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Yesterday morning, I had coffee with Brian Williams at Panera.  We talked about a lot of things, in particular, the fact that Brian had just patented a vaccine that when given to the parents of children who have not been vaccinated will remove all the fallacies and misconceptions in their brains.  We also talked a little about a cat he had saved out in the parking lot.   All right!  Enough of this foolishness!  I never met Brian Williams for coffee.  I’m just taking advantage of this public figure and kicking him when he is down like so many others are.  Shame on me!

Let’s face it, embellishing one’s past isn’t something new.  Remember when one time Syracuse area coach George O’Leary lost his dream job as head coach at Notre Dame when it was discovered that he had fudged the facts on his academic resume.  But come on, don’t we all do things like that?  Don’t we let folks think we’re a little bit more important than we really are?  I remember one time when we were in Virginia Beach or Myrtle Beach or Pismo Beach, or one of those beaches, and I was sitting on a bench enjoying the sun while Linda visited a gift shop or possibly a honky tonk saloon.  A guy sat down next to me.  We started up a conversation.  This.  That.  The other thing.  I told him I was an English instructor, and he asked where?  I was going to say in the Syracuse area. . .” because no one knows where Chittenango is.  Especially someone at Vero Beach.  But he cut me off after the “Syracuse,” saying, ”oh, wow, you instruct English at Syracuse University!  We love Syracuse University basketball.”  Right then, I should have said, “no, wait, I teach high school English in Chittenango.”  But I didn’t.  Shamefully I rode the tide of illicit fame and pretended to be an SU prof.  Then the guy asked me if I knew the Pearl or Marius Janulis, or Mookie Jones, or one of those guys, and I said “no, but Fab Melo was in my class in ‘English As A Barely Acceptable Language.’ ”  The point being here is that I failed to be totally truthful.  And I’m almost half positive that it actually happened like this when we were vacationing at Venice Beach in either California or Italy.  And I think there might have been a helicopter involved, but I can’t swear to it.  Anyway, who are we to judge Brian Williams when we have likewise sinned?!

Some more dirt was dug up on Brian, though.  Highly opinionated columnist Kathleen Parker, or was it Fess Parker, has suggested that Brian Williams was not only having trouble remembering the truth but had become a loose cannon at NBC, apparently with no one to give him a check or a balance.  Makes me wonder if he was the one who got his daughter Allison the Peter Pan gig.  His inability to properly recall his “helicopter incident,” makes me wonder if he misremembered Allison’s youth.  Maybe she didn’t play Peter Pan all the time as a little girl like Brian “remembers.”  Maybe little Allison really wanted to be Penelope Pennywise, the bathroom attendant in URINETOWN, and stood outside one of the families many bathrooms collecting quarters from anyone who wanted to use it.  Or maybe she was of a more classical bent and wanted to play the hunchbacked, hideous title character in a cross-gendered production of Shakespeare’s RICHARD THE THIRD, and went around all day wearing a false hump and frightening herself each time she saw her shadow.  This would explain the lumpy performance she gave as Peter Pan.  It’s her dad’s fault.  Of course, it does nothing to explain the shipwreck that was Christopher Walken.

So, in the end, Brian is on a six-month suspension.  Word is out that during this hiatus, he will be starring in the new musical which sends Pinocchio to the Wicked Land of Oz and is entitled “How Green Was My Nose.”  Previews suggest that the closing song will bring down the house.  Title?  “Defying Honesty.”

Just What It Means if You Were Talking to the Most Obnoxious of the 3 Stooges and Stuttered His Name!

I love words.  I love learning new ones.  I am particularly intrigued by slang words and expressions.  I’m pretty sure that I was the first teacher at Chittenango High School to use the expressions “talk to the hand” and “my bad.”  Becky Wilson and Diane Newman taught them to me during “Little Women” rehearsal.  Last Monday, after the Seahawks dreadful Super Bowl ending, I was talking to a youthful Panera friend about the now infamous “call” and Peter Carroll.  Of Coach Carroll she said, “What a momo!”  It was a new word.  I didn’t know what it meant to be a “momo.  Rather than asking, I decided to do a Google search, and the first word-related place I was taken was the "Urban Dictionary."  There I discovered that “momo” was crass to a startling degree.  If you wanted a profane epithet to fit any occasion, you had found it in that two-lettered four-letter word.  Warning:  I am about to post the URL for the "Urban Dictionary’s" definition of “momo.”  If you are positively put off by profanity, then go no farther.  Do not click on the URL below.  I REPEAT:  DO NOT CLICK ON THE URL BELOW.  Don’t let your curiosity get to you and make you come back later on.  But. . .having been forewarned. . .you simply have to know the nasty mass of meanings for “momo,” then click right here, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=MOMO.  For my older readers, of which there are many, you now know what it means if your children or grandchildren talk about a “momo,” or, perish the thought, call you one, and you can take proper corrective action.  I don’t plan on using the term. . .probably.--Greg Ellstrom