Food

Dead Bugs & Fat Families

We went out after dark and drove one of our favorite 25 mile loops into the less populated sections of the county. Smashed about 1,000 bugs onto the front of the Miata. That is OK as tomorrow it will get a wash. Later in the day we are headed over to North Augusta to help the Sno-Cap Drive In celebrate their 39th anniversary, throughout the day various local Car Clubs hang out for an allotted time. We will be sharing the lot with the Mustang Club. There will be free drinks and food samples served by middle and high school cheerleaders, plus games, contests and trivia. Pleasant way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon.

At the end of our drive was a stop at Krogers for the essentials for breakfast tomorrow. Eggs, bacon, bananas, apples and a cantaloupe. As we were walking in, we had the misfortune of following in a fat family of three, mom, teenaged daughter and a pre-teen. The “littlest” was 4′-6″ and 150 pounds. The teenager was maybe 5-8 and 175. Mom was a little shorter than the teen and weighed more, maybe 200 lbs. The two daughters were busy calling each other names. The mother was telling them to stop it and they just ignored her. They went left and we went right. Of course we ran into them again near the eggs. The teenaged daughter was standing there swinging the gallon of milk she had in her hand not paying attention to anything. We had to shift over to another aisle to get by. The two girls were still bickering and the mom was still shushing them. We made it to the cashier and guess who got in line right behind us? Right. After listening to them for about 30 seconds we left that line even thought we were next and went 3 lines over.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $1140.66
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 211

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Dinner

Well, actually, pay me $25 to eat dinner. Donna would rather I didn’t share this with you and I don’t think it is my most shining moment either, but it happened, so here goes:

Friday night in Dahlonega, GA we went to our favorite place in town, Caruso’s. It is right on the square and has some of the best pizza we know. We got a new waiter, probably just back in school at the local college, that wasn’t the swiftest antelope in the heard. He checked in one to many times to see if our food was OK (which is as bad, if not worse than, not checking at all.) But then we had to call him over to ask for the check. Once he brought the check for $12.50 he never reappeared. We both had time to visit the restroom.

I went second and as I was heading back to the table, I saw our waiter leave the dining room. I thought, good, he’s got the check. Donna told me he had just walked on by totally ignoring her and the $20 bill in the tray. Tired of waiting we headed towards the entrance to the kitchen where we could see behind the curtain, the cash register and another waitress doing a check. When she came out, she asked us what we wanted. I replied, “To pay our bill.” She looked at it and said, “Oh that’s Ralph’s,” and ducked back into the kitchen. While we stood there waiting a different waitress appeared and asked what we wanted. Pointed back where she came from and repeated, “Pay our bill.” Waitress number one reappears and says, “He’ll be right with you.”

When Ralph finally appeared he handed me the tray back with my change and walked off. No sorry you had to wait, nothing. I walked back to our table to leave him a couple bucks tip anyway. When I got there I noticed that he had placed my $7.50 in change right over the top of the ticket and my original twenty. The little devil on my shoulder said, “Take it!” – so I did, it and the five.

Ick, What’s That?

Up this morning in Dahlonega, Georgia and even though Holiday Inn Express’s cinnamon rolls are awesome Donna wanted eggs for breakfast. We asked the desk clerk where to go and she directed us to Danny’s just up the street. When we got there about 7:15AM we weren’t sure they were open because there was only one car in the lot. The sign said they opened at 6:30 so we went on in. Glad we did, nice home cooked breakfast type place. The food was good and cheap. And it showed, by the time we left the place was nearly full.

After chow we headed to Marietta by as many back roads as we could. There was even a 15 mile detour around a bridge that was out on GA53 we hadn’t planned on, but it was Ok because GA136 was a real nice Miata road. And like most of these roads in North Georgia on a Sunday morning, deserted except for us. We eventually had to get on I-75 to finish the trip to R-speed for there 4th Annual Open House. We got there at about number 25, by the time we left 2 hours later the lot was nearly full, probably 150 Miatas and about a dozen Minis. I was not swayed to buy any of the bargains, but did buy a new Rspeed T-shirt.

When we got home this evening and started to unpack the trunk I noticed what looked like brown water all over some of the bottom layers of stuff. At first I thought it was muddy water as we had tossed our dirty hiking boots in there. Upon closer inspection it looked like spilled Coke, which is weird because we didn’t have an open soda near the trunk all weekend. It took me about a hour to clean up the mess and I still need to let the bottom carpet dry from the cleaner I sprayed on it before I can vacuum it and then put it all back together.

Purchased Today: $14.75 in gas
Money spent since 03/03/03: $1140.66
Started up, went down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 209

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

Last fire story—The Activities Committee several weeks ago had set up a Bar-B-Que luncheon for those employees who wanted to participate for Thursday. The cost was $9. A local favorite BBQ joint, Shealy’s, came in and set up their food warmers and laid out all their stuff on a couple tables in the cafeteria at around 11:00 AM. The first group in the plant that goes on lunch break is QA with about 25 people, and they start at 11:30AM. I don’t know how many of them took advantage of the BBQ lunch. I have no idea how many total throughout the plant were scheduled to get BBQ, but QA were the only ones to get a chance. Them and me. I eat breakfast at around 6:30, so at 11:30 I’m digging into my lunchbox even though my scheduled lunch time is 12:15. The fire alarm went off at 11:40ish, about 2 minutes after I got back to my desk with my plate. The caterers were forced to abandon the food to evacuate the building. When it turned out to be an actual fire and the smoke made its way into the cafeteria, the food was no longer able to be served to people (wouldn’t have mattered, as no one was allowed back in the building until around 3:00 PM anyway.)

Friday morning a couple of members of the Activities Committee made the rounds of the plant and gave everyone who had signed up for the BBQ their $9 back. When I tried to refuse the money, saying I had actually gotten my food, they told me that it was easier all the way around for them this way. Cool, I got a picnic BBQ on the lawn for free.

Can I Get A Meal?

We arrived in Martinsville, VA about 12:30 PM and stopped at the Holiday Inn Express to see if per chance we could check in. We could and did. Donna had a hankering for Chik-fil-A and we wondered aloud what the odds were that we could find one in this town. The helpful desk clerk said take a right out of the parking lot, at the second light go left and the mall is on your left about a mile down the road.

The mall was an older one, built probably during the hay-day of malls, in the early 80’s. There was no food court, just a fast pizza place and the Chik-fil-A. The Chik-fil-A was packed and the lines were long. Turns out it wasn’t so much the lines to order, but they were people who had already placed an order and were waiting on their food. Trying to politely decipher which was which was impossible. We considered leaving to find someplace to go, but figured a short wait wouldn’t be too bad. Not too long after we decided to stay a clerk called out, “I’ll help the next one in line.” I started towards her, but a woman came from nowhere and proceeded to order her lunch. Donna and I looked at one another and promptly did an about face and headed for our car.

Back towards the hotel there were a few places, so we headed that way. We spotted an Applebee’s, but hesitated. We like the food, but dislike them because they separate the smoking and non-smoking sections by an imaginary line and a thin railing. To make matters worse the bar and smoking section are on a lower level making a nice chimney effect to draw the exhaled smoke and smell right into the non-smoking section. Deciding to give them a chance anyway because we were getting hungry. I got into the turn lane and waited for the arrow. Looking left there was an entrance to a steak place to the right of Applebee’s that was closed, so I made a U-turn and got in the right lane looking for the other entrance only to realize that the entrance I saw was for both places. I drove a quarter of a mile back the wrong way, U-turned again, returned to the original light and waited for the green arrow again. The hostess seated us against the wall on one in response to our request to be as far from the smoking section as possible. Maybe it was just inattentiveness or perhaps we had broken an unwritten hostess rule by requesting special seating, but there we sat ignored. After no one came over to greet us or take a drink order within the first couple of minutes, using the silent communication that married couples develop in time, we discussed leaving with just a glance. I said out loud, “Wait here comes a waitress, if she isn’t ours, we’ll leave.” She paraded slowly by without so much as a glance our way. We headed for our car once again.

Up ahead was a Ryan’s Steakhouse, complete with a woman out front in a poorly made cow costume waving at the drivers as they blew past her at 55 MPH. Unfortunately our survival instincts overrode our good sense and we pulled in, even though we knew what was in store for us inside. Both of us really didn’t want steak for lunch so we chose to dine on the Mega-Bar. What started out as a simple salad bar 10 years ago, has transmogrified into a buffet of immense proportions which includes every thing you could possibly think of, except salad. The variety of fried food stuffs is only out numbered by the quantity of vegetables that have been cooked and swimming in butter or prepared with animal fat as a seasoning. To be honest there was the makings of a tossed salad to be had, but by the time I found it, I was so full of chicken wings, fried okra, etc. to not want any.

Fuddrucker’s For Dinner

Way back in the 80’s when they first started appearing on the landscape, Fuddruckers were the be-all-to-end-all of hamburger places. I remember when the first opened a store in New Orleans there were signs posted outside that said, No Photography Allowed, so no one would steal their decorating idea of leaving empty food cases arranged around the place.

Well it is twenty years later and the bloom is off the rose. The burger I was served was good, but not up to my memory and certainly not the “Worlds Best” with which they billed themselves. Which is why perhaps some truth nazis made them paint over that particular phrase on the awning outside the door.

If you click on the link to the company’s site you will find that they still use the slogan “Worlds Best Hamburgers” in their logos and I presume advertising. The one we ate at in Columbia, SC looked way run down and probably hasn’t been changed or updated since it opened. Makes me want to go to a different one and see if perhaps it was just this particular restaurant, but I probably won’t as there is usually plenty of other places that I would rather eat.

Now That’s Italian

On our way up north to meet sis and hubby in North Carolina. The most interesting thing of the whole drive occurred just outside of downtown Aiken on Laurens Street. Just as we were passing the post office a small gray object fell rapidly from the sky above us and hit the road a few inches in front of the nose of the car with a splat. As I looked in the rearview mirror I could see the squirrel dash towards the side of the road. I guess he missed a branch. Just imagine if I was 2 secs earlier leaving home or a light changed on a different schedule or the squirrel paused a beat longer thinking about the gap between those branches? I wonder what kind of havoc a squirrel landing in the cockpit of a moving convertible might cause? Would not be pretty!

In our increasingly harder to accomplish task of finding a different way north we crossed into Georgia for a bit of our trip. As luck would have it we were in the small burg of Clarksville, GA around lunchtime. We stopped in the center square and walked around looking for like candidates for a nice meal. We ended up going into the Zanzo Side Door Deli. It was on one side of a building and the regular Italian restaurant was on the other. Donna had a chicken salad plate on some greens with fruit on the side and I opted for the lunch portion of baked ziti. Man it was good. Almost worth the 100 mile drive it would take just to go back. This food was so Italian good and we were so in the middle of nowhere, backwoods Georgia that the folks running the place had to be witness protection relocatees.

Purchased Today: $26 in gas
Money spent since 03/03/03: $830.88
Started down, went up, went down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 130