It wasn’t the best start for the day. In fact, it wasn’t even the start of the day; it was well after the start, something of a second chance at the beginning, if there is such a thing. It’s the end of Medical Procedure week, and I have dropped Marissa off at the clinic where she will have a procedure done. It sounds scarier when you phrase it that way — “have a procedure” — but I don’t feel like going into an in-depth explanation of it. She will probably be a while, and I have walked the half-mile to this coffee shop, where I will spend my time drinking coffee and browsing the Web and writing and maybe even reading. I pause inside the store to take out my phone and see if the place has Wi-Fi. There’s not much point in settling in if they don’t, and there’s a Starbucks a few blocks away. They have Wi-Fi.

It looks like they don’t, so I head back outside, but once I’m out there my phone informs me that they do, indeed, have Wi-Fi and I head back inside. But now there’s someone else in front of me, and as I stare at the display case she proceeds to order every single pastry they have. Every single one with the exception of one almond croissant. I hate almond croissants. I probably would have ordered one of the apple strudels if I had been able to ignore my inner voice, but those are all gone, as are the chocolate croissants and whatever else was in that section. She has swept it bare. It’s my turn now, and the woman behind the counter asks me what I want. I say “Well, I guess I’m not going to have the apple strudel!” and I’m laughing about it, because it’s funny. I’m in a bakery, it’s the morning, and they have nothing to offer me but a lonely almond croissant. The woman who bought every other pastry turns to me and offers to swap an apple strudel for the lone almond croissant and I smile at her and tell her that I’ll go for the oatmeal. It’s better for me anyway.

And, actually, the oatmeal was my first choice anyway and I’m grateful not to have the temptation of the strudel even if it does sound like it might be a good movie title. There’s nobody in the place — well, there are three other people, but in a place this size that counts as nobody — so I pick out a likely table and set my stuff down. There’s no outlet though, so I check out the little room on the other side. Perfect. There’s a table by the window, and it has a handy outlet. I haven’t been all that good about keeping my netbook charged, so this seems like a good idea. The window is a large picture window, and it looks out on a deserted patio and a busy street. There’s a parking garage on the other side. The window is single-pane, which means that the cold radiates from it. It’s not forty degrees outside, and the promise of a warm afternoon is just that right now, a promise. The reality is that it’s cold in here, but only on my right side. Just the same, though, I’ll probably survive.

So that’s how day two starts. The blog is in place, although there are cosmetic tweaks left to do. The book… well, I have my ideas. I think I’ll go back to the original premise, that there are these people who are all leading their perfectly ordinary and boring lives despite all the things going on, things of which they are unaware. There are two affairs, and there’s a stoner teenager who is about to crash her car into one of the main characters, and that incident will bring everything into focus.

Henry’s problem is probably his enforced isolation, his inability to find anything to do now that his wife has been gone. Of course, she’s been gone for a while, but that has just given him the opportunity to make his dull routine all the more routine, automatic. Then there’s the coffee guy, and he should be a character who doesn’t seem to have any redeeming qualities but who manages to surprise us.

Coffee guy’s wife runs off with somebody else’s husband. That’s one of the triggers.

And there’s Java waiting for me when I get home. Today should be day two of the 21-day course, but I’ll have to catch up with yesterday just a bit. But all of this depends on The Procedure that Marissa is undergoing, how long it takes, how she’s going to feel when it’s all over with. It isn’t always about me.