This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse.

A couple of things about the journey home for the holidays: We saw the most extraordinary sunrise over the Houston airport yesterday. Pictures we got on our Blackberry don't do it justice. Also, the shuttles the Orlando airport employs for taking passengers around the various park-and-fly lots are hydrogen-powered. Rock on!

Anyway, back to the Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse. By small town, southern standards, it is gourmet (a.k.a. loaded with sugar). The menu lists each coffee drink as being "1/3 espresso," and the baristas thought we'd gone coo-coo when we asked, "Does that mean it's only 1/3 of a shot of espresso?"

"No, retard. It's 1/3 of the cup is espresso. Duh."

We resist the urge to give these baristas a talking-to, explaining how being rude is not necessarily a part of making good coffee (Vivace, we miss you already). To add to the whole thing, we just heard a local exclaim he'd never been to a Starbucks before. "Well there isn't one locally," he added. Right now: Wham!'s Christmas carol on the speakers. Ah, hometowns.

Another, probably more notable occurrence this morning came from that photo there. Check that shit out--Free Parking 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. We literally said out loud, "What is this free parking you speak of?" as we snapped that photo. Granted, the downtown DeLand strip is about one-third the length of Broadway, but parking is still at a premium. It's all relative. Parallel parking along Woodland Blvd. is free in one-hour increments.

Even more remarkable: it's not totally full. Of course, we parked at 8 AM on a Tuesday, when all the good people of DeLand are working. Judging from the wifi situation, we're going to bet most of them aren't work-from-homers like ourself. We actually thought for a moment, If we lived here, we would so get up early just to get the freel all-day parking space. But then we thought, If we lived here, there would be absolutely nothing to do downtown for eight hours, so it'd be a wash. We'll see if there's a ticket when we get back to the car.