All this school­ing is mak­ing my head hurt and all this eat­ing is mak­ing my belly hurt. After train­ing today we just headed back to the hotel to rest up for din­ner. Instead of dri­ving back to Con­cord to overeat at Razzoo’s we decided to just walk across the hotel park­ing lot to Applebee’s and stuff our­selves. Quite a let down from last night. The high­light of the meal was we got to make fun of our waitress.

She came over and took our drink order first. Being as we weren’t dri­ving, alco­hol was called for in this sort of sit­u­a­tion. Mark ordered a bot­tle of Coors Light and I asked what kind of dark beer they had. It should have been our first clue when she named off a cou­ple and then asked us if Mich­e­lob was a dark beer. I opted for a Killian’s Red (which is brewed by Coors, by the way.) Off she went.

After what seemed a long time later she came back and asked if we were ready to order. Mark and I looked at each other, then back at her and nearly simul­ta­ne­ously asked, “Where’s our beer?” To which she replied, “I’m not old enough to serve you, some­one from the bar was sup­posed to bring you your drinks.” She smiled sheep­ishly and went away, to return a minute or so later with another per­son car­ry­ing beers. When the helper left I told her we would be polite and not drink any until she left. We both ordered the riblets. After she left Mark said, “I should have asked her if she was old enough to serve ribs.”

When she did bring our meals Mark told me (loud enough so that she would hear), “See, I told you she was old enough to serve ribs.” She smiled slightly. She checked on us a cou­ple times dur­ing the meal and when we got about 3/4 way through eat­ing and she showed up I told her to see if she could get one of her assis­tants to bring us another round.

We got in one more when it came time to pay, Mark asked if she was old enough to take cash. After she left both Mark and I com­mented that we didn’t think she was wait­ress mate­r­ial, because if she was she would have taken the rib­bing with a lit­tle more humor. I think wait­ress­ing is a lost art and in the 5 meals we have eaten out so far on this trip we have had one real wait­ress and one who has poten­tial, the other 3 are just going through the motions because they need the money.

I’d tell you all about the good and the great if I wasn’t so full I’m in a stu­por. I think I’ll just turn on the Weather Chan­nel and let the dul­cet tones of mete­o­rol­o­gists lull me to sleep.

Donna and I work in a man­u­fac­tur­ing plant and our Qual­ity Assur­ance depart­ment uses what they call an NCMR to flag parts that are bad. NCMR stands for Non Con­form­ing Mate­r­ial Report which is the polit­i­cally cor­rect term for crap parts. Like the parts that aren’t up to spec would have it’s feel­ings hurt if we called them scrap or something.

Today at work the Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee had a bake sale to raise money for projects they do dur­ing the year (and per­haps to help defray the cost of psy­chi­atric help for the frag­ile egos of non con­form­ing parts.) Donna vol­un­teered to bake some of her renown choco­late chip cook­ies for them to sell. Last night we made around 10 dozen cook­ies. As always there are a few that get baked a lit­tle too long or crack and break when they are removed from the cookie sheet. Want­ing to put only her best cook­ies on sale we took a paper plate full of the rejects to work to give away on my side of the plant.

To be cute I placed a lit­tle sign over the cook­ies that read:
Non Con­form­ing Cookie Report.
Failed inspec­tion for the fol­low­ing rea­sons:
1) Heat treated to long
2) Rough edges
3) Gen­eral workmanship

Within a half an hour the cook­ies were all gone, but some one had placed a sign over the top of mine:
Sec­ond sam­ple of 24 required to make final deter­mi­na­tion. Sub­mit to Engi­neer­ing Depart­ment. Day shift only.

Tonight Donna and I went out for a scoop of ice cream. We went to a place on the south side of town, J. Flanagan’s, that used to be somebody’s home, but has been con­verted into a busi­ness like 90% of the places along this for­mer res­i­den­tial street that has become a byway between two major com­mer­cial roads.

I got a cup of my usual, some sort of cof­fee fla­vored treat while Donna picked some­thing slightly dif­fer­ent than her nor­mal. While wait­ing to be served I was mag­i­cally trans­ported back to high school by the music play­ing in the back­ground. Tuned to one of the sev­eral local “clas­sic rock” sta­tions, the radio was play­ing the stoner national anthem, Led Zeppelin’s “Stair­way To Heaven.”

When we got our ice cream and sat down I heard “Stair­way To Heaven” end and “Misty Morn­ing Hop” start. I usu­ally don’t pay atten­tion to which day of the week I’m on at any given moment (except for Fri­day after­noon), but right away I knew it was Tuesday.

Yes­ter­day I accused Net­flix of throt­tling me because my lat­est movie was going to take three days to get to me. The movie arrived today and now I real­ize the delay was my fault. By pick­ing such an obscure movie it had to come from Netflix’s moun­tain vault in Reno, NV.

I rented “Writ­ten in the Wind” at the sug­ges­tion of my soon to be retired man­ager who said he saw it in col­lege. He couldn’t exactly remem­ber what the movie was about, but he thought is was pretty good. What he did remem­ber vividly was the open­ing sequence where Robert Stark is bomb­ing around the deserted street of a west­ern town in a flashy two seat Allard J2.

It was a lit­tle over the top, which appar­ently all the crit­ics love, but we hated, so we turned it off after about 10 minutes…

“Lost” starts in about 20 min­utes and I’m going to try and watch it. I’m afraid though that I’m not going to like it, that I really should wait for the DVDs. I think the com­mer­cials are going to give me time pon­der and…

…Donna said it best last week after she did what I did, went back and read the syn­op­sis of the first 12 episodes of sea­son two, “Read­ing these makes me won­der why we are even watch­ing this crap.”

They are Tim­ber­land Pro Titan Oxford 40045 and look a lot like these, but are lighter in color, more tan than brown. Mama got some new shoes too. Donna spends quite a bit of time on the shop floor, so she wears steel toed shoes as well. She will be styling and pro­fil­ing in a pair of Lehigh High Heel Slip-on #483.

We drove all the way to Colum­bia to the shoe store to get a good selec­tion, boy do we lead an excit­ing life.