We met at the The Cup in the Central West End for cupcakes. It was a beautiful day, so we sat outside and talked while pedestrians strolled by and the sun shined in our eyes.

Miranda moved to St. Louis last October and is still trying to get the lay of the land. The decision to move here was pretty spur-of-the-moment. She grew up in the Chicago area and got her undergrad at Illinois State, followed by a year of working at a hospital in Springfield. It was a big change moving from the city to farm land, so she decided she wanted to move back to a city, but Chicago was too expensive. So, St. Louis it was! On Halloween weekend she moved in and immediately made friends.

One of the people she met during her first week introduced her to a guy at a party and they hit it off right away. Three days after moving here she was in a relationship and happily ensconced in St. Louis. "I didn't have any intentions of settling down..." but here she is!

Miranda is studying to be a nurse practitioner in midwifery and women's health. "Babies is mah thang," she says, as we eat our fluffy cupcakes. Apparently people ask her why she wants to work in midwifery and women's health because it's "gross". But, she worked in the ICU right out of undergrad and she saw so many deaths...so, she needed a change. Now she helps bring life.

Side Note: At this point a woman walked by with her daughter in a stroller. Her daughter was babbling and bouncing and the mom apologized and said her daughter was "cupcake wasted". Miranda and I shared a good laugh. 

"It takes a special person to be a nurse, and if you don't love it, you need to get out of it." When applying to the nursing program, she was asked why she wanted to do it. She feels like everyone that gets into the program has an inspiring story. Here's hers: While in high school, Miranda was in a car accident where she was hit head-on. She doesn't remember much from the initial impact, just that people were running out of ihop to help. She suffered burns on her forearms from the airbags, she fractured her top row of teeth, broke her left wrist and tore the ligaments and slammed her knee against the dashboard. Miranda thinks this experience made her want to go into nursing. She wanted to be able to help people the way they helped her. 

Besides studying, Miranda enjoys hi-liter fights with her boyfriend, spending time with her long-haired Chihuahua or cat (that she swears is feral), and performing Irish dance. She's not Irish. It started because a friend suggested they try it together and she ended up continuing for years. She's even picked it up again now that she's here in St. Louis.

Will She Stay in St. Louis: Probably. She has to choose a state to take her nursing boards. She's pretty serious with her boyfriend who lives here, but not sure if they'll stay.

How Did She Hear About Free Coffee with Aubrey: Through Ryan from Coffee #12

St. Louis Likes: The heat, and she's met a lot of other transplants and everyone has been very friendly.

St. Louis Dis-likes: Humidity.

Tattoos: "Trust in The Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own understanding" on her ribcage 

Who lived in your home before you? Do you know? Matt hired someone to find out for him, and the results were pretty interesting. That’s not all that’s intriguing about him. He started one of the most successful Urgent Care centers in St. Louis and has helped wounded soldiers in Iraq. Ladies...are you swooning, yet? You should be, when I last met Matt, he was single.

The sound of the coffee grinders whirred in our ears as Matt and I sat down at Starbucks for coffee #34. He began by telling me about his practice. In April 2008 Matt started Total Access Urgent Care. The project went from dream to completion in about 8 short months. Now 5 years later, he has 4 locations, with a goal of 10. “Everything in my life is fast, so once I decide to do something, I just do it. If it works great, if it doesn’t work you do something else.”

It worked. Over 270 reviews on Google, almost all 5 stars, prove that’s the case. The reasons people are loving Total Access Urgent Care, in Matt’s own words are, “We’re easy, fast, nice and inexpensive.”

Matt came to St. Louis “in the year of the great flood”, or 1993, to study at Washington University Medical School. He left to do his residency in Baltimore and then joined the Navy. He sipped his coffee as he explained that he didn’t enjoy the experience. “They tell you what to do, when to do it, how to do it.” He didn’t fully comprehend the fact that he could go to war when he signed up. Much of the time he was sitting in a tent in the desert of Iraq (he was also in Japan and Florida), and he doesn’t even like camping! “My idea of camping is a 40 foot RV with pop-outs on each side, air conditioning and TV.”

It’s fairly common for people to become interested in and research their family history. It’s not so common to research the history of a home, but Matt did! His 110 year old house has only been owned by 6 families. The original family's patriarch had a large role in the Listerine company and was good friends with the Lambert of Lambert Airport.

Matt and I briefly touched on his hobbies next. His first hobby? Work. Ok, his second hobby is travel. He’s been to Hong Kong, Bali, New Zealand, Australia and several places in Europe. I almost choked on my hot chocolate. New Zealand is my dream destination. I would love to dive there (and hike and explore and spelunk...). Matt said it was the best trip ever, he did hiking, biking, sea kayaking and it was phenomenal!

I told Matt about my diving trip in Mexico where I ran out of oxygen when I was about 50 feet underwater. It was definitely eye-opening and I will now ALWAYS check my oxygen tank. Matt affirmed that...”What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”


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“The bathroom is awesome by the way. It is. It’s like a little room.” Meet Kai. He really likes the bathroom at Foundation Grounds in Maplewood, where we met last month for a coffee. I told him that bathrooms usually were little rooms, to which he responded, “Touche, it’s very homey!”

Kai beat me to our meeting place and had already purchased a lavender honey coffee before I could buy him a Free Coffee with Aubrey. After his first few sips he decided the scene would be more complete if he had a fireplace and a bear rug.

After telling me that he curses a lot and that he doesn’t understand why people start a sentence with “no offense” (his response to that is, “well you’re an asshole”), we really delved into the meat of our conversation. We talked a lot about my website and brand. He told me that he’d never seen anything else like it, so he set up a fake e-mail account in case I was an axe murderer and contacted me.

There were a few things that stood out to him, one was that I wasn’t going to make my goal of 300 connections in 6 months. The second was that my website didn’t tell him anything.

Kai gave me a lot of advice on how to make some positive changes. He said my first mistake was buying my domain from weebly, that I should I have bought it from another company. But not GoDaddy...their CEO hunts elephants. “How douche-y do you have to be to hunt elephants? It’s like...Hi, I eat children on a daily basis. It’s ridic.”

From here we moved on to the future, and it’s digital. Kai thinks that five years from now paper won’t exist...or people won’t use it anymore. Already people don’t use landlines, and every kid born today knows about google. He does SEO and internet marketing and he says if you’re not doing internet marketing, you’re making a mistake. “Business might be good today, but today is not tomorrow.”

He says that if you have to run your business and it can’t survive without you, then you are your business. Today, a business can be sustainable so you can work from Tahiti. But...his first priority is Africa. Where he could meet some bedouins and eat a camel (he was kidding). Traveling takes a lot of money, however. So before he starts traveling, it’s on his to-do list to meet a rich doctor. According to him, he’s pretty useless around the house and he’s high-maintenance, so that’s really the only good option (we gave each other a high-five for being useless around the house).

He’s only partially serious about meeting a rich doctor, because if he met someone that was poor and had a really great connection, “fuck it, you know? So be it. But would you rather eat steak or would you rather...” I finished the thought, “live on applesauce?”

Nine times out of ten, my conversations turn to recommended books and Kai and I were no different. I recommended ‘Built to Last’ which he has read and enjoyed. So he told me to read ‘E-Myth’. The last thing that Kai shared with me before we ended our hilarious and informative conversation, was the idea of an underground restaurant. He said you sign up, they send you a place and time, they blindfold you so you don’t know what you’re eating and you can experience the food more. What a really great idea! Would anyone sign up for Blindfolded Coffee with Aubrey? I’m guessing no.


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