Buffet Day.

Earl and I have eaten our way through this fine Wednesday. I’ve done such a spectacular job losing weight over the past couple of days that it was only fitting to celebrate by eating as much as possible. Plus, since there was drama involved with the new car, I felt I needed to calm down by loading my arteries up with as much fat as possible. If I wasn’t happy about the car situation, then I might as well just be jolly.

I started the day normally, a bowl of Life cereal, a glass of orange juice (Anita Bryant be damned) and then off to work. I took a moment to call Partners Trust Bank to find out where the Lien Release for the Impala was, since the car had been paid off almost three years ago. They suck. We originally had a loan with Herkimer County Trust, which was bought by The Savings Bank of Utica, which changed their name to SBU Bank who then joined forces with BSB Bank to become Partners Trust Bank. We made the idiotic gesture of paying off the loan during one of the transitions, the first one I think. Herkimer County Trust was your typical local bank, with a teller named Maude who still used a crank calculator and handwritten deposit receipts. SBU Bank and its various incarnations, on the other hand, laughed at the face of human interaction and charged a huge fee to use a teller while making all electronic transactions free. So of course these two banks were perfect candidates for a merge. Anyways, our lien release was lost somewhere in a stack of papers that seemed to be destined for Peoria, Illinois and it would take some hefty research to even think about retrieving the documents. I don’t think I’ve slammed the phone down that hard in a long while.

So I stewed, which made me hungry.

At lunch we joined my friend Susan and her daughter, Courtney, for a popular buffet at the local Radisson Hotel. It was as good as a casino without the gambling at twice the price. It was great to catch up with Susan, as we used to work together before I switched jobs last year.

Around 3:00 p.m. Earl informed me via e-mail that the Acura dealer had threatened Partners Trust Bank with doing their loan stuff with someone else, someone more deserving, and viola! Lien Release found. So now we’re scheduled to pick up the Acura tomorrow night at 6:00 p.m. I’m counting the minutes.

To celebrate, we went to the local China Buffet where there’s lots of Chinese Food (wontons and such) and American Food (something called ‘Frieds’, I think they meant ‘Fries’). The food was exceedingly bland and not worth the calories but it was interesting. Especially since a guy two tables away saw me using chopsticks to eat my food (not the frieds though) and asked me, yelling across the restaurant, why the Chinese used chopsticks. Before I had a chance to suggest a theory, he answered his own question by letting me know they must have run out of metal and started using bamboo instead. I said “that must be it.”, and went back to eating. I did take a moment to notice that Earl and I had more teeth amongst the two of us than the rest of the patrons put together.

So now my stomach is complaining and I’m hungry. I’m not going to eat again since I’ve gone way over my caloric intake limit. I think I’ll hit the sauce instead.