Thank the Lord (or whatever) for coffee houses. 

Today, I'm sitting with my older boy, Addison. We're at a coffee house. This last weekend, Nadine (my lovely wife) and I hung out at our favorite place, the local bookstore. Where did we sit to look through our prospective purchases? A coffee house. My younger son, Ian, and i sat in a coffee house toward the end of the school year last Spring and made up weird, funny alternate rules to the classic card game, War. The day after, he shared with his teacher how much fun he had had on our "date."

I've spent hundreds of hours in coffee house during my return to writing. The places feel like familiar rooms in my house, if not members of my family. I'm curious to see how I'll think about coffee houses when I'm older, looking back on my life.

The standouts coffee houses have been Cafeggio's, Olmos Cafe, La Taza and, shamefully, various Starbucks locations around San Antonio. Like Microsoft, Starbucks can't be avoided.

Cafeggio's in the Stone Oak area of San Antonio. It was a terrific, independent coffee house about a mile from home. And I say "was" because Addison and I drove by it today and it, finally, has failed. You see, though it was a great place at first -- great help, great coffee, great seating and atmosphere (if a little to bright for glossy screens at certain times of the day) -- once it was sold by the original owners, the shine went away. The coffee was good, but they moved the furniture around. Overnight, there wasn't a single comfortable place to plug in a laptop. And you couldn't tell the management because no one spoke English better than a tourist. Then again, when the second people sold it, it got even worse. The one saving grace, the coffee, became undrinkable with the third group of mutated owners. What were they thinking.  It was bitter-sweet to see the place close, but, given the horrid quality of the place at the end, its failure was inevitable. Regardless, Cafeggio's will always be closer to my heart than any other coffee house in San Antonio, and perhaps any coffee house period, because it was the one where I got my start on my serious phase of writing.

Next is Olmos Cafe, another fine coffee shop in the Olmos area of San Antonio. I'm certain Olmos Cafe would have been my favorite coffee house were it not a 20-minute drive away. Hands down, Olmos Cafe has the best interior design, music selection, artistic and tasteful drinks and best baked snacks of any coffee house I've visited in San Antonio. It is a modern, masculine, peaceful space with comfortable couches, traditional tables and cubicle-line booths for more concentrated laptop work.

My favorite current go-to coffee house is La Taza at Brook Hollow and 281 North. It's may bring to mind a country breakfast-oriented restaurant with its too bright interior and nowhere-close-to-modern furniture, but there's a great, living room vibe I haven't found before in a city setting. In fact, La Taza reminds me of Buffalo River Coffee House in Hohenwald, Tennessee, which looks exactly like you'd expect a coffee house 30-minutes away from other civilization to look.

And Starbucks. You can't avoid them. You've all seen them. They are the McDonald's of coffee houses: predictable, acceptable drinks and snacks, safe music, generic furniture, neurotic staff (did I say that?). It's the rest stop on a long trip. You know they'll be there on your way if you can just hold it long enough, but they're not the best place you've ever stopped.

And now I'm finishing up this blog. It's 9pm and I don't feel remotely like going to bed. It's the coffee. I guess it's not a total loss though. I get to think about the conversation and the quiet Addison and I spent at yet another coffee house today.