October 2006

So I’ve got this vegetarian thing going on again. I know, it runs directly in conflict with my love for BBQ joints, but I figure we can still go to those places, I’ll just have to eat corn on the cob and whatnot.

I’ve been maintaining my weight pretty well since losing around 35 pounds at the beginning of the year, but there’s a magic number I want to hit before Thanksgiving and I am determined to do it. I probably could achieve it a little easier if I got my butt to the gym but with school, on-call and social obligations, I’m not up for working out at the gym at 2:30 in the morning. I hear the place is quite popular then, so who knows, it might be interesting, but I’m too lazy to do that.

To think that on several occasions in 1990 I set the alarm for 3 a.m. so I could go tanning!

With all the health conscious people and crazy diets floating around our fine nation these days, it’s not hard to fine something vegetarian at any given restaurant. “I’d like a Whopper without the Whop.” That usually goes over the BK drone’s head, so I end up saying “leave off the meat”. I know, I could opt for a BK Veggie Delight but it takes something like an act of congress and a bunch of glares and sighs to get one of those at the closest BK.

Now if Wegmans would locate a little closer to us so I could enjoy the “Nature’s Place” section, I’d be golden but for now I’m relegated to the local Hannafords. It could be worse. I could be limited to Price Chopper where they think vegetarian includes “Vegetarian Baked Beans with Bacon”. “Are these beans vegetarian?” “Yes, just as the sign says.”, replies the deli clerk. “Why is the bacon on there?”, to which she replied, “For flavor of course!”.

I think tonight I’m going to have a BBQ steak salad without the steak. It’s yummy.

Earl and I eat out quite a bit. Why? Because we’re lazy. We’ve worked all day. We’re not in the mood to cook. So we take the easy way out and we head to one of the local restaurants. It happens a couple of times a week.

Since we’re rather well versed in restaurantese, we’ve had the opportunity to see some very odd things in our travels. There was that time at Mc Donalds in Horseheads when two men dressed up like the Blue Brothers came walking out of the bathroom with toilet paper dragging from their feet. At that same visit, a woman stood her toddler up on the service counter, complete with saggy diaper, and told him to keep his clothes on. (Apparently the kid liked taking his clothes off in public. Perhaps he’ll be a congressman someday.)

Tonight we watched a similar scene.

We were seated at a table in this diner wannabe type place called Zebbs. The corner was occupied by three women, all around my age or so, and three children. The youngest, a girl, was seated in a high-chair behaving herself quite well. The two other children were boys, probably four or five years old. Though they weren’t twins, they were dressed alike with matching shirts. One had very thick glasses. He amused himself and those around him by jumping up and down on the booth seat shouting “I’m bad! I’m bad!”. Did Mother stop him from this outburst? Of course not. She pretty much ignored him and let him carry on.

He was the tame one.

When the server came out with their food, I breathed a sigh of relief since it was obvious that the kids would be occupied with their monster meals.

Wrong.

Boy number 2 proceeded to make like a plant and sit on the back of the booth, wedged where the two windows met to form the corner of the restaurant. He amused himself by flapping the vertical blinds back and forth. When that didn’t grab Mommy’s attention, he proceeded to jump ONTO THE TABLE.

This got Mom’s attention where she threatened him with a timeout and then proceeded to carry on her conversation, unphased by the fact that her child had practically walked across the dinner table. Afraid of this always scary threat of “timeout”, the kid jumped to the back of the booth where he made like a bat and sat upside down while enjoying his meal.

I have fairly accurate memories from when I was a child. On the rare instances we did eat out and actually sat in the restaurant (usually we sat in the car outside of Carrols or Red Barn), I don’t ever recall ever having to be told not to walk across the table. Especially while food was on it. Perhaps my mother will chime in and correct me on this, but I’m pretty confident that I didn’t do any acrobatics in a restaurant when I was a kid. If I had lept across the booth of a restaurant, she would have smacked me six ways to Sunday and I would have remembered.

I wonder what tonight’s terror is going to be like when he’s grown. Maybe I witnessed the making of the next flying Wallenda.

As I’m sitting here drinking another glass of iced tea, a few questions about beverages cross my mind.

1. How do they take the caffeine out of tea?
2. Can a person OD on iced tea?
3. Does diet soda damage your teeth like regular soda does? I mean, it doesn’t have sugar in it so it should be as bad, right?
4. How does adding chlorine to sugar make the sugar lose all its calories?
5. How come a combination of chlorine and sugar is safer for you than that old saccharrin? Why don’t we just regular soda with a Chlorox chaser?

I know, it sounds like I’m having a Jessica Simpson moment.

I’m taking some comp time from work today simply to catch up on some household chores. I had a whole bunch of ebay stuff to ship, plus I wanted to get caught up on laundry and everything since Earl and I are going to be in Philadelphia this weekend.

So I was driving home from work following my normal route. I am fortunate that we live near one of the local freeways, so aside from a few blocks of “city” traffic, it’s smooth sailing on the short drive home.

Except when someone is driving the wrong way up the freeway.

I had just jumped on at my usual interchange and had BT cranked up on the iPod. I was behind a tractor-trailer when all of a sudden the tractor trailer made a quick swerve to the right, into the shoulder. I immediately slowed down, not wanting risk damage to my beloved Acura (who cares about me, SAVE THE CAR). Then I noticed that there was a mid 90s Oldsmobile headed for me. The elderly driver, a man from what I could tell, was straddling the dotted white line, apparently oblivious to two things: he was headed the wrong way down the freeway and he was headed for other motor vehicles. I jumped into the shoulder, beeped my horn and yelled at him (surprisingly without profanities). I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish by yelling, as if he couldn’t see the car or the tractor trailer or hear my horn blaring, I doubt he was going to hear me yammering away at him from inside the car with the windows closed. He got by us and from what I could tell in the rearview mirror, he proceeded to drive several other vehicles off the road as he made his way up the freeway in the wrong direction.

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

First of all, I don’t believe that just because you’re elderly that you no longer have the privilege of being a motorist. And it’s just that, a privilege. It’s not one of your rights. George Washington did not cross the Delaware to secure a driver’s license for all. And that includes horse and buggies. Older people need to ambulate just as much as their younger counterparts do.

That being said, I believe that all motorists should be tested on their driving skills at least once a decade. Vehicles change, roads are reconfigured and driving habits deteriorate. Now I’m not saying that you should go through a full-blown road test with hand signals and all that, but I believe that you should have to demonstrate to a certified test official that you are able to navigate both local roads and freeways safely and efficiently without causing harm to yourself or those around you, and you should have to do this every ten years.

I also believe that if you drive something bigger than your average Cadillac sized sedan (read SUV) then you should have to demonstrate competency in being able to handle that safely. Yes, I believe that to drive an SUV you should have a special rating on your license. And to get that, you need to be able to drive it, park it in a parking lot, navigate a narrow street and parallel park.

If the requirements for maintaining a driver’s license were a little more stringent then perhaps we’d all pay a little more attention to what they were doing instead of yakking on the cell phone/slapping children/shaving/applying makeup/etc.

I just reread the previous two entries from today and found that they made me sound quite cranky today. I don’t feel cranky at all, just full of opinions I guess. I’ve been busying myself about the house while covering on-call for a couple of hours for a co-worker, Earl is parked on the sofa (or in old English, Davenport), watching the Eagles game on Monday Night Football. I occasionally hear a loud “YES” or “GO” in a very authorative football fan voice.

Go Eagles!

So while it may seem that I’ve been a little cranky and/or spacey today, rest assured that I was my usual jovial self. And thank goodness tomorrow isn’t Monday.

During a particularly agitating phone call with a customer today I decided to let my mind escape for a few moments while the customer ranted and raved about something quite trivial in the great scheme of things. What I find insane, quite frankly, is I daydreamed about singing a cover version of Dead Or Alive’s “In Too Deep”, complete with cowboy hat and chaps with my ass hanging out for the video.

Thank the Universe I’m not trapped in an episode of Ally McBeal or I would have found myself sitting at my desk in that very outfit.

Oy. Where the hell did that come from? Shockingly, it’s just another Monday in my book.

Maybe I need my own theme song or something.