Happy at Starbucks

I am so happy right now, so very very happy.

I am at Starbucks in Streetsville, which is a village within a city and it is very chi-chi. Don't tell anyone but I have a humongous cappuccino at my elbow, fully loaded with raw sugar and cinnamon and it's in a happy Let's Merry Christmas paper cup which, as I found on Twitter, John Wiswell hates  (Wiswell John Wiswell "Let's Merry"? As though I needed a reason to loathe you, Starbucks.) but frankly it makes me ridiculously happy. I like following John on Twitter, by the way. He's funny.

After two days in a truck stop where I felt like I was gonna get killed any minute, I am relaxed and mellow and listening to Joni Mitchell sing abstract jazz. There are five or six other people working around me, noses buried in their laptops. One girl has pages of music in front of her. She is slender and ethnic, a student of music, with her regal long nose and her long legs and her black coffee. There's a chubby young man in a pink shirt across from me. He is earnestly wearing a Remembrance Day poppy and his MacBook Pro is exactly like mine. There is an older woman from the suburbs, sitting at a stool at the coffee bar. Her hair is like Weezie's, the main character of my novel. She is sitting on her white down-filled ski jacket. I heart her ski jacket but if I had it it would be filthy within the first hour of use. Maybe the first half hour.

There is no Starbucks where I live. No happy Christmas cups. No earnest young men in poppies or regal-nosed music students. I want to buy a mug to take home with me, to remember how creative I felt sitting with the other laptoppers, listening to Joni, eating the cinnamon-sugar foam off my cappuccino with the slim wooden stir stick, the shiv of the Starbucks set.

I am like Hugh Grant

Today I am Hugh Grant in that movie Two Weeks Notice. This hotel is my home and I am running around here like I own the joint, which I do, for the next day and a half.

Except I can't, by rights, call it a hotel because it is a motel. Actually it is a glorified truck stop.

I was all excited about going to Mississauga for two glamourous days in a spa-like writing sanctuary while Dave is taking a transmission course at Chrysler and, lo, here I am in the Husky truck-o-rama, full of grizzled, leathered, tattooed truck drivers and enough carbohydrates to to float a rolling turd.

Yup, I look out my window on the fifth floor and there, spread before me like a Freightliner assembly plant, are acres of tractor trailers. The thought has occurred to me that I could go for a "walk" out in the parking lot and maybe make some extra coin. It could pay for one of those nifty polyester-fluff neck rolls they have on sale in the gift shop.

I am, however, making the Best Of It.

This morning I chose a fresh apple over make-your-own-waffles, stale croissants, white toast and canned fruit salad. Then I went to the exercise room and tried out all their equipment. Man, their bike is WAY harder than my bike. I just about popped a gasket on that one. I can just see the headline: Country Bumpkin Found Dead In Puddle Of Sweat In Tacky Truck Stop. Mother Mortified. 

When I was good and stinky I staggered into the pool area, had a lovely swim with the pool all to myself, then an even lovelier hot tub with all the jets pointed at my sore bits – namely the throbbing gluteous maximus on my hiney.

Then I dashed into the truck stop store and picked up a large coffee (free for hotel guests!) and have come back to my freshly cleaned room where I am now drinking coffee and eating dry bran cereal which I brought from home. I also brought yogurt but forgot a spoon. Am thinking of chugging it right out of the squeezable container, although I'm sure Hugh Grant would send up for utensils.

I must write now. Although googling photographs of Mr. Grant is far more entertaining.