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Ok, my last post pointed out that the first Chipotle in Oklahoma will be opening soon in Tulsa. But Ben pointed out in the comments that he had already seen a Chipotle sign along Broadway in Edmond. When I heard that, I had to check it out immediately.

He’s right! There is a small Chipotle sign on a lot at the SW corner of 15th and Broadway in Edmond, just south of the Starbucks. It’s a little strip mall that looks to me to be about 75% complete, not counting time for internal buildout. Looks like Chipotle will be sharing the building with an AT&T store and a few other, smaller, retailers. I didn’t have my camera with me or I would have shared a picture (darn!).

So, Chipotle’s logo is alive and well in the metro area. I must admit, I’m a bit disappointed that Edmond gets the first one. Well, let’s step back — I’m disappointed that Tulsa gets the first one in Oklahoma and also that Edmond gets the first one in the metro area. But you know what, I’ll take it. The Edmond location is a mere 20 minutes from my house. When I lived in Houston, the closest Chipotle was 25 minutes away if traffic was good, and we made the drive quite frequently.

Of course, there’s no word on when this Edmond location will be opening, but my best guess is early 2008. Hopefully very early indeed!

Ok, if you don’t already know how much I love Chipotle, please read this to get the full understanding.

So, currently the closest Chipotle restaurants to Oklahoma City are in Witchita, KS.  There are three of them there, at around 154 miles away. 

Just slightly farther out are the multitude of them lining the North side of Dallas, even one in Denton proper.  These ring in at about 160-170 miles out.  Of course, I frequent these most often as I rarely have any reason to go to Witchita.

But, if you had been paying close attention to the Chipotle website over the past year, you would have noticed that both Tulsa and Oklahoma City had pins in them on the “future development” map they used to have up (the map has now been removed).  No further info was given.  Just a couple of pins showing that they did indeed have the intent to build here.

And if you’ve paid even closer attention over the past couple of months, you may have taken a look at the Chipotle job boards where you would have seen jobs advertised in Tulsa, indicating that a restaurant opening is just right around the bend.

Well, now we’ve a location.  It’s not open yet, but 10902 E.71st St. in Tulsa is about to become the closest Chipotle to OKC at a mere 100 miles away, cutting almost an hour off of the gulf separating Oklahoma City from all kinds of tasty.

Not quite close enough to accommodate lunch hours though, so we can only hope that an OKC location will be coming quite soon. 

Today, I am beginning my first blogging series. This is a topic I have wanted to discuss for a while and I believe my thoughts will extend beyond a single post.

I believe that most believers would agree that sin is not a laughing matter. We don’t laugh about most sins. You know, the bad ones like murder and stealing and adultery. Those are serious sins, right?

There is one sin, though, that I notice people tend to joke about regularly. That sin is … are you ready … wait for it …

Gluttony

How many times do you see someone sit down in front of a big plate of terribly unhealthy food and joke about how unhealthy it is? We say things like “man, this is a heart attack on a plate,” or “boy, I really shouldn’t be eating this.” Then, of course, we go right ahead and eat it all.

I know I am just giving a few examples but my point here is that, in general, a lot of people laugh about the fact that they are doing something that’s wrong. It just seems that we don’t take the matter very seriously.

I guess I really got motivated to start up this series when I read this post from the About Oklahoma City blog. Evidently, I am living in one of the most unfit and unhealthy cities in the nation where obesity is rising and things are just all around bad.

Obesity is a problem, but that’s really not what I want to focus on in this series. I think the bigger issue is self-control and moderation, because that’s the problem I see with gluttony. It’s certainly detrimental to one’s health, but it’s even more detrimental to one’s spirit as it is evidence of a lack of self-control. And I think that we all need to be more disciplined and have more self-control, regardless of our waist size.

I want to be clear that I’m talking to myself just as I’m talking to everyone else. I personally struggle with this issue a great deal and that’s why I feel it is so important. People often look at me and say “you’re so skinny, you don’t need to watch what you eat.” I think that is just more evidence of the problem, because you don’t have to be really large to struggle with self control.

I love to eat. Eating makes me feel good and so when I feel bad I often want to eat for comfort. I go beyond eating enough to be filled and move into eating just because it tastes good or feels good. Every time I work hard at eating right, there is huge temptation to not eat right. Why is it so hard? How do we overcome it?

Well, I think the first step is to acknowledge that it’s a problem and, unfortunately, I think that’s the step where most of us fail. After all, if we joke about it or laugh about it, we are not taking it very seriously. It’s as if we are saying we know it is something we should do, but we don’t think it’s that big of a deal so we’re not going to work hard at it.

I guess that’s really the point of post number one. There will be more on this topic to come.

I use gmail on my own domain for my personal email running on dailygenesis.com.  At Element Fusion, we also use gmail for our company’s email solution.  So, needless to say, I am a big gmail user.

However, I’m not one of these guys who digs into every feature and facet of an application right off the bat.  I’d rather just figure things out as I go along, which probably costs me a good deal of productivity in the long run, but oh well.  So, anyway, I’ve never archived a single email message in gmail ever — until now.

I figured, “why archive?”  I mean, I can just keep everything in the inbox and search for what I need, right?  Why take that extra step of clicking the “archive” button.  Seems like a waste to me.

But, I finally found a good reason.  You see, when I have emails that represent things I need to respond to or things I need to do, I need a way to keep those in front of me.  Now, I could star them or label them, but that doesn’t make them pop out at me, so I prefer to mark them as “unread”.  That way, they look very different in the box.  But, here’s the problem.  Gmail doesn’t have a way (at least that I’ve found) to show only the unread messages in your inbox.  If you know of a way to do this, please let me know because it is this, and this alone, that has led me to get into archiving.

That said, now that I’ve started archiving, I’m not sure I can go back. Once I got the 5,000+ messages sent over to “all mail,” I was left with just the “unread” messages awaiting my attention in my inbox.  I marked them as read (which I can do now, since they are the only messages in my inbox), and there is something pretty satisfying about not having any “unread” messages.  It’s somehow more peaceful.  Also, there’s something nice about “archiving” a message when you are finished with it, as if to say, “farewell, message, I have no need of you anymore.”

So, I’m not sure that I’d go back, even if there is a way to view only the unread messages, which I’m pretty sure there is not and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.