Food

Frustration

While returning from Hendersonville on Saturday afternoon I witnessed the true definition of frustration.

We were zipping along south on I-26 somewhere south of Spartanburg with Donna at the wheel and me watching the world go by at 70 MPH. Up ahead I could see three turkey buzzards right on the edge of the shoulder moving back and forth towards the road. One would take a couple steps towards the right lane and then quickly hop back. Then another would do the same thing. When we got right next to them I could see what was going on. There was a small piece of roadkill about 2 feet into the right lane and after a car passed, one bird would take a few steps towards what it considers food, he would get about 5 feet from a tasty morsel, then another car would approach making it hop back to safety. Trouble was, traffic was fairly light and there were single cars in the right lane spaced evenly about 200′-300′ apart, so there was never enough time to get a nibble safely.

Started up, went down, went up, down again, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 659

With This Ring I Thee Wed

Back when Donna was in the hospital and they were aggressively working at healing her ailing colon she was being given 40mg of Prednisone a day and she was very hyper with signs of ADD. Her favorite pastime was to cut up paper and magazines to make bows and ribbons. She loved to tape things to other things with the hospital supplied clear dressing tape. Thirdly she hated clutter and was forever rearranging and cleaning up. She used a food tray to keep all her supplies on and it moved with her from bed to chair and sometimes the floor as she worked on her “projects.” As a consequence of the medicine and the zero humidity air of the hospital her hands were always dry and chapped. This led to a lot of applying of hand cream.

Early in her stay she removed her wedding ring and the birthstone “engagement” ring we bought for her after the glass chip feel out of the real one early on in our marriage. I kept them on my keyring to return to her when she got out. As the the hospital stay lengthened she asked for them back. You know where this is leading right?

Somewhere around Day 8 the rings went missing. We weren’t even sure when they actually disappeared because time was very fluid for someone taking that much steroid. Best guess is one of the times she took them off that day to put on hand cream, they were laid on the craft tray and somehow got thrown away during a cleaning up of scrap paper. The staff was very upset and helped tear apart the room looking for the rings, even looking in the cleaning persons trash collection, but they were nowhere to be found.

We were not that upset, things happen and even though there is that line in the vows, neither one of us felt that losing the ring had any significance in the overall scheme of our marriage. We have been meaning to look into buying a nicer set of rings, maybe even do a major upgrade in quality from the set we could afford when we first started out, but as time passed we came to the conclusion that there was not much sense in that. Donna has started to feel funny without any rings on, so we have been keeping our eyes out for something that would quasi-match my ring whenever we went in a store. Last night as we were poking around in Dillard’s looking for a pink sweater for Donna we came across a table with some jewelry on it, including some rings. Hey look, here’s something that’ll fit the bill, its gold and has a bunch of shiny little bits around the circumference. The size 6 was too small, but the 7 fit just right. And at twenty bucks the price was right. Wait a minute, here is a size 9, I wonder if that will fit my skinny finger. Yep, sure did, we have matching rings again. As a bonus the rings came a sets of two, so we have a backup in case one of us misplaces one. Behold, the Tivoli CZ Eternity Band Set.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 576

Fajitas Para Dos

Tonight Donna and I treated Mark and his wife to dinner at Sala’s for him helping me panel the laundry room. Donna and usually split a single order of Fajitas, but because the steroids she is taking make her hungry all the time she said we should go ahead and get Fajitas for Two and that way the leftovers (if there were any) would be good for her lunch the next day. Mark wanted a Speedy (a taco and an enchilada that is on every Mexican restaurant’s menu), but here it is only offered at lunch, so he had to order a “Pick 2 Combo” which doubled the price (at least it came with rice and beans instead of just one of those with the Speedy.) Mark’s wife Susan ordered the same thing she always gets, even though she read the menu front to back and vocalized a couple of different choices, in the end, it was the usual Chicken Fajitas for her.

When the food came to the table Mark’s plate came out with our tortillas and rice and beans. No sign of meat for the Fajita Folks. In what I’m sure was a shorter time than it felt, out came the Fajita platters, but without the telltale steaming sizzle that normally makes everyone in the dining room look and nod knowing that someone is getting Fajitas. Minus one point for presentation.

When they placed our Fajita plates on the table I noticed that Susan’s pile of chicken was the same size (if not a teeny bit bigger) than our steak and chicken for two. Donna pounces on the waiter and lets him know that we are not paying any more than for the single fajitas because we certainly didn’t get twice as much meat. He mumbles something about that it wasn’t his fault it was the cooks and hurries off.

When the bill comes Donna says to me, “Check to make sure that he charged us right.” The waiter hears this and knowing what I’ll find says, “If you want to have the bill changes you have to talk to the manager.” Ooooh, what. Is he going to come out with crossed ammo bandoleers and 45 revolvers strapped on? We said, “We’ll wait.” The manager comes out a few minutes later, listens to our story, and says, “I’ll take care of it.” Which he did.

We probably would not have said anything about it with the meat portion being the same if the cost was a couple bucks more and not fully double a single fajita dish. Afterall we did get twice the tortillas, rice, beans, pico de gallo, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, sour cream and guacamole.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 574

Doctor Ordered Seperation

It has now been a week since Donna has returned home from the hospital and she is making slow and steady progress towards normal. In that week her sister has come and gone, leaving behind a refrigerator and freezer full of cooked food that fits into Donna’s colon friendly menu (and is tasty to boot) and I have gotten about 30 hours of sleep total, none of which has been more than an hour and a half consecutively.

Whenever she gets up to go to the bathroom, I wake up too. I have to turn on the bedside lamp so she can find her way to and from because the Xanax makes her very drowsy. Most nights around 2:00 AM (the doctor thinks because of the steroids) she feels so cold that she has to put on a second long sleeve shirt and a thicker pair of socks. Then for whatever reason, she cannot stay in bed past 4:00 AM and her rattling around in the kitchen making grits keeps me from returning to a full sleep.

Needless to say this is taking its toll on me, even the people at work notice that I look like crap. Yesterday at lunch I went out to the car covered myself with a blanket and tried to get some shut eye. I set the cell phone alarm for 12:55 so I would wake up and get back to the drawing board. Fortunately I woke on m own at 12:53 because I had set the alarm for 12:55 AM!

Today we both had doctor’s appointments, her with the gastro guy to see how things worked out with Monday’s medicine change (very good) and me with the GP to check on my blood pressure (better than I thought.) My GP is her GP and even though it was my appointment he did ask about her some too. When I told him that I was having sleep issues his “cure” was a script for lorazepam and the recommendation that we try sleeping in separate bedrooms. So tonight, because tomorrow is a work day, we are going to give it a try. She will spend the night on the living room couch with the TV and I will stay in the recently vacated back bedroom with the PC and internet radio.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 537

Cosmic Dog Run

How far would you drive for a hot dog for lunch? 135 miles? We would.

Saturday we are going to take a road trip to Mt. Pleasant, SC to visit Jack’s Cosmic Dogs. Now the timing of our trip may be a mistake, this place was recently featured on the Food Network’s The Best Thing I Ever Ate (which is the reason we are going), so there might be a crowd, but after driving that far we will probably even wait a bit before giving up.

You know now that I look, if we were to swap the rotation of our loop, we could hit a second place featured in the same show, a BBQ place in Orangeburg. But we won’t be doing that, we’ll just save that for another day.

Of course we will be doing some geocaching too. I’ve picked out almost 40 along the route, but 3/4 of them are if we feel like it on the way there and back. The important ones will be in the middle around Charleston where we hope to get 3 Delorme pages and 1 county for the SC Challenges.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 527

Onions Are Like Underwear…

…you gotta have ’em. Or so said a contestant on Chopped this evening.

This morning we met the MMC for breakfast in Augusta and Donna and I left a bit early with plans to do a little geocaching on the way. Well it turned out we weren’t that early and didn’t stop anywhere. There was a cache that was located right behind the shopping center where breakfast was to be, so we walked around to grab it before going inside. With the title and the hint we think we found a part of the cache, but the actual container didn’t appear to be around. Dang.

The eleven of us finished eating by 8:15 and we were then stuck, the bowling alley, our post breakfast entertainment, didn’t open until 9:00. We stood around outside the door of the restaurant chatting and watching someone in a truck in the parking lot tossing bread out of his window feeding seagulls. After the novelty of that wore off, we trooped down to Kmart (the only other place that was open in the center) and shopped for blue light specials. Tiring of this Donna and I said, “We’ll meet you there.” There was geocache right down the street. Found it, yeah!

A couple of games of bowling was quite enough (my wrist was sore by frame 5 of the second game) and most of the group were busy picking out a lunch place while Donna and I and another couple walked 2/10 of a mile to behind a restaurant to try and find a cache that was hidden there. It was sprinkling slightly and GZ was between the back of the restaurant and its dumpsters, it wasn’t the tidiest place, so we gave up looking after about 3 or 4 minutes. Darn.

After our failure the 4 of us went our separate ways. Donna and I were going home, but couldn’t agree on what we wanted for lunch, so when we drove by the place the rest of the club had picked, we pulled in. It was BBQ place, not atypical as they had other meat items and seafood on the menu, called Flyin’ Cowboy. The food was slightly better than good and I could probably eat here 2 or 3 times a year, but probably won’t because it is 25 miles away. One of our group ordered a “Manhandler” which consisted of 6oz of pulled pork piled on top of a softball sized loaded baked potato. John was up to the task and finished the whole thing, along with both his side dishes, earning himself the title of “Potatohandler.”

To recap, on today’s Miata Club event, we all drove separately to a restaurant and had breakfast. Afterward we did some shopping together followed by driving to a bowling alley separately. We bowled a couple of games together and then drove separately to another restaurant and ate lunch. Well, at least some of us actually drove Miatas…

Here is the top count from yesterday, the first nice day since it seems like Thanksgiving. Today it was cold in the morning and now hasn’t stopped raining since this morning.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 521

Feeling A Little Like Hansel

Along with the usual cornucopia of food stuffs that I normally get in my lunch, I had a bonus, a a 2oz. bag of Zapp’s Hotter ‘N Hot Jalapeno Potato Chips. The Accounting Manager had some pound cake in her office. In a cube in PIC there was both a German Chocolate Cake and a sort of Lazy Man’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Thing, i.e. one big thin cookie from a tray and chopped up. The department next door had their holiday luncheon and had left over (large) Chocolate Chip Cookies. In the afternoon there mysteriously appeared a Whitman Sampler box in Engineering. On our doorstep when we got home was a Christmas box from my brother that included chocolate and cajun cashews, a chocolate peanut cluster thing and some almond wafers.

I am a little nervous that one day soon I will walk into a darkened room, someone will lock me in and then up the heat.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 513