Keyboard potpourri

Regularly scheduled blog post interrupted due to keyboard groping

This was not supposed to be my next post. Oh bother.

I just spent some serious time working on my “pay it forward” post regarding some awards I’ve received where the rules state I have to pass on awards to se7en other bloggers and reveal se7en things about myself.

Spoiler alert: Victoria’s Secret. That’s all I’m sayin’.

It turned out to be a lot more work than I was expecting to do that sort of post. I had to think and stuff and everything! So, rather than try to push the post out before its time, I’m switching to keyboard-monkey-mode so I can get something out tonight while I’m still awake.

Here are some random things from my brain. Whatever.

Bear Jamboree
My wife and I ran into another bear today. That’s two bear encounters in three days. Pretty good, huh? I was able to grab this photo.

Television Graveyard?
We parted ways with our Panasonic television today. To recap: We paid $2,400 for the thing over three years ago. It worked about 14 months before it died. When waited over a year and finally took it into the shop earlier this week while on our vacation. The repair estimate came back at $550 which is more than it would cost to buy a new one, so I guess the darn thing is a disposable item. It is pretty sad when repair costs exceed the replacement cost for a completely new item. The repair shop said they’d “recycle” the TV for us so we didn’t even bother to pick it up. I’m sure that means they’ll fix it cheaply and sell it for a profit. I couldn’t help but notice they had used sets for sale in their lobby.

Chef, control thy ingredients!
Lastly, we had lunch today and we’ve finally learned an important lesson about being vegetarians. When placing an order in a restaurant, it is not good enough to simply say “no bacon” or “no ham.” I say this because my wife’s omelette the other day contained some small bits of bacon which is kinda sorta a no-no for vegetarians. Then today her salad had pieces of chicken in it.

My wife picked out several pieces of chicken and showed them to our waitress and boy, did she really care about that. She even said, “Will you be wanting any dessert?” My wife says that place is on her list now. 🙂

You’d think that restaurants would control their ingredients better. No mandarin oranges in the clam chowder, no anchovies in the ice cream, etc. Alas, that seems to be too hard.

So from now on in addition to saying “no bacon” we’re going to add: “We are vegetarians. It must be a vegetarian preparation.” No more confusion and no more accepting anything less than what we order. Dammit.

Fancy Bakery / Four on the Floor
On our recent trip to the big city we visited a special kind of bakery. It is called a patisserie which, of course, is Francais for “fancy bakery.” And at that bakery they served something called petit fours which, of course, is Francais for “cake at $1 a bite.”

Klingon Spring Rolls
Also in the big city we visited a P.F. Changs. For those unfamiliar it’s a “China bistro.” Part of the shtick is that they mix your sauce table-side. Ooooh. I ordered the spring rolls that had the little vegetarian symbol on the menu. My wife, who knows these kinds of things, noticed the outside of the spring rolls were barely warm and the insides were completely without heat. I had to flag down our waitress and ask if the spring rolls were Klingon? She didn’t grok so I elaborated, “You know. A dish best served cold?” Unlike the other restaurant, however, they cared about what we said and brought us hot ones and when we received the bill, they’d taken them off which they certainly didn’t have to do.