Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: dinner

  • Two Out of Three Ain’t Good

    Tonight we went to go see Speed the Plow. When I saw that it was part of the 2007 season I was excited. I really enjoy Mamet and the first reviews of the show were solid. I wanted to go see it, but it was running for 3 months and I was busy and picking the night that I would have enough time to see it seemed like too much work. Then on Tuesday I realized that it was closing this weekend. That was it. I was out of time, and we have people in town this weekend that would not want to go see it with us. That left us with only a couple of days left. I got tickets for tonight, even though we were so busy it was difficult to imagine going.

    I really like both of the men cast in the play (Greg Germann and Jon Tenney). Alicia Silverstone is also in it, and even though I did not instinctively think she’d be a great stage actress, most of the reviews said that she was the reason to see it. That she really did a good job and was the best performance in the cast.

    We arrived and rapidly discovered that out of the huge cast of three, two of the roles were being played by understudies. I was so disappointed. Plus in this day and age, they could really be updating the website on a daily basis with casting changes. I bought the tickets the day of the show. I was at the site. I could have seen and made a choice about whether I still wanted to go. In general I don’t mind seeing understudies. I often times find they are wonderful and talented and throwing themselves even more into the part because they are getting a big break when the regular can’t be on stage. Still, in such a small cast… Especially considering that the cast was part of the reasons I was looking forward to it. The man who took Jon Tenney’s place to a large extent seemed to be doing a Tenney impression, and doing it well. The woman… Well, frankly I just did not enjoy her at all. She was not *anything* enough. Now admittedly Mamet does not always write his female characters quite as well as I would like, but this was not about the dialog. I also don’t know what the director asked for, so to blame it all on the actress would not be fair. However, if she is playing a part that is getting mentioned in the reviews as the key performance from another actress, it makes me suspect that the something that went wrong here could not be squarely blamed on the direction.

    The character is rather pivotal, so that was definitely a let down. I did enjoy the play though. Greg Germann and Rob Kahn were both quite watchable.

    The seats were angled somewhat uncomfortably, and just completely wrong for the kid’s back. She was in pain throughout the show. I was cold, but when I leaned over to whisper that to the husband, he thought I said I was bored, so it didn’t occur to him to offer me his jacket. During the intermission I saw he had a jacket and borrowed it, but I only got to use it for a few minutes before we put it behind kfz to try to provide more support to her lower back.

    This was my first time seeing Speed the Plow, but I know Mamet, so we did discuss whether or not to bring kfz along, but we decided that taking her with us to see something by a playwright that I really like had enough value. As expected ,it was full of vast amounts of swearing and people hanging out somewhere between morally questionable and full on reprehensible. It will give us something to talk about tomorrow.

    We went out for dinner after the show, and the husband was putting his leftovers in a togo box as the waitress brought him a refill of iced tea. She suddenly grabbed her eye and went rapidly away from the table, with his iced tea still in hand. It turned out he had managed to splash spicy mustard directly into her eye. That hasn’t happened to us before.  Seems worth a few points.

    The rest of the day was busy and exhausting. I am amazed I could even stay away through the show. We had fourth row seats, so loud snoring probably would have been quite distracting to the actors. Now I just want to go to bed, but I still need to take care of some things. I am just going to power through the bare minimum.

  • Random Mutterings

    Still chafing over this DST crap. It has really thrown a wrench into our lives. It shifted our morning schedule because our morning starts with an alarm clock and the clock time changed. We just work an extra hour because our evening schedule is based on the way it feels, and we don’t typically look at ending our work day until it feels late and we are feeling hungry. I don’t necessarily mind putting in an extra hour of work, we are behind on everything. The problem lies in that by the time we are ready to get dinner, our restaurant options have shrunk by 90%. I could cook, but the whole not feeling late and hungry means I haven’t started prepping already, plus since I am behind on everything, managing the grocery shopping becomes an issue too. The past two nights we drove up to the restaurants of choice to find them closed and were stuck with something else. Last night we did manage to grocery shop, so I will cook tonight. I need to set an alarm so that I notice it is getting late and start cooking on time. I think somebody is coming over dinner tonight.

    I used to hardly ever eat breakfast. I didn’t feel hungry in the morning and when I did eat in the mornings, it made me feel sick. Every once in a while I would make an effort to regularly eat breakfast because the common philosophy is that breakfast is “good for you”. Even after I stuck with it, dutifully eating a bowl of cereal or having a bagel each morning for a month, it still made me feel ill. It certainly didn’t feel very “good for me” and I’d give up on it. Then a couple of years ago the husband and the kid began having a regular breakfast routine that often involved cooking bacon. Soon I found myself attracted to the smell of bacon in the morning. I’ve now been eating breakfast regularly for about 2 years and I really do feel much better. The key for me is that mornings really have to be seriously about protein. Many traditional breakfasty things are fairly high carb (cereals, pancakes, pastries) and eating those things in the morning made me feel positively ill. It was especially problematic because I typically only ate breakfast because I was going out with other people, so not only was I have the morning carb load, but I was eating large portions too, since that is what breakfast places were serving. So now I usually have a small high protein meal in the morning and it tends to make me feel better throughout the day than I used to feel with no breakfast, so that’s one improvement in my life, and I really am pleased by any improvement.

    Most mornings I have spinach and an egg, or some egg whites and some bacon if somebody else cooks it for me. The egg whites is a new thing too. A little over a year ago we went out to breakfast and I ordered an omelette based on the ingredients. It sounded good. It arrived and was all white on the outside. I actually said “What the fuck?” I looked back at the menu and it came default as an egg white omelette. I’d never had one before. It always seemed like something people did to be healthy and when it comes to food I really prefer it to be about the food, especially if I am eating out. Still, I had ordered it, so I wasn’t going to send it back. It turned out I actually preferred it. I liked the texture better. I guess I should have beens surprised because if I get eggs cooked to order I go with sunny side up or overeasy, I don’t care for scrambled. So that led to me purchasing and using egg whites at home.

    This morning I still had some spinach left, but it was no longer in an edible condition. The fridge is running too cold right now. I keep tweaking but it isn’t helping. Without my normal spinach I was poking around trying to figure out what else to eat. I ended up making an artichoke heart, cillantro, onions and bleu cheese, egg white omelette. I really liked the combination. I’ll have to toss that into my breakfast rotation more often.

    Today I need to go buy more spinach, and eggs too.

    Maybe I will get dressed and head out of the house now. As I have mentioned before mornings are not my most productive time. So far I have only managed to do random internet time wasters and answer a couple of important meetings, made my daughter mad at me, plus have a brief talk with the writer/director of the short. This is all fine as long as I don’t give in too much to the random internet time wasters later in the day once my energy is up.

  • I’m Welcome

    We went out to dinner the other night, and I ordered roasted chicken with steamed vegetables, and to start, a wedge salad (wedge of iceberg, with crumbled bleu cheese, bacon, and tomatoes) with the dressing on the side. The waiter repeated back the fact the dressing was supposed to be on the side. He also named the wrong type of dressing. I told him the correct type and reiterated “on the side”. He named the correct type and parroted back “on the side”.

    I freely admit it. I am high maintenance. At a really amazing restaurant with an excellent chef, I will eat whatever the hell they want to serve me, but at a marginal restaurant with marginal food I need to make some adjustments so that it becomes tolerable. Dressing on the side is one of those adjustments. I am picky about dressing and I think most of them are, at the very least, not worth the calories and the sodium that I would far rather wolf down in some other fashion, and a good many of them are downright disgusting.

    Most interesting salads (like those with real bacon on them, which is a great way to consume calories and sodium) have enough stuff going on that they taste good without any dressing. Boring salads are fine with pepper and some lemon on them. Some places have good dressing and then I pour it on.

    The kid ordered a kids meal, which comes with a drink, but the menu did not specify what the drink options were. She asked the waiter if she could get a hot tea with her kids meal. I wouldn’t have been shocked if he had said no, but at the same time the hot tea is the same price as the sodas which I know they offer, and cheaper than the lemonade which I also know they offer with the kid’s meal. He said that would be fine.

    We waited and waited. Our salads arrived. Mine had dressing on it. It was drowning in the stuff. We told the waiter that I had ordered it with the dressing on the side. He stood there looking at me blankly. I repeated myself and he looked at the salad. I explained that I don’t like very much dressing, so I get it on the side so that I can control the amount. He kept staring at me. We had to detail out that I wanted a new salad, with the dressing on the side. He agreed and wandered off.

    Thirty seconds later our dinners arrived. By our, I mean not the kid’s, because surely we wouldn’t all want to be served at the same time. Also, we of course don’t want our salads to arrive early enough to actually consume them prior to our meal arriving.

    I sat and waited for my salad. It arrived, with the dressing on the side. It was a much smaller wedge than before, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was missing the bleu cheese crumbles. I didn’t ask for no bleu cheese crumbles. Those help to make it taste good. I requested that they bring me the cheese. I tasted the dressing. It was some of the most disgusting dressing I have sampled in quite a while. I pushed it far aside so it couldn’t infect my salad through osmosis.

    The kid’s food finally arrived.

    The bleu cheese crumbles showed up and I ate my salad, and then my meal.

    When the bill came, they have charged us for her hot tea. I point out to the waiter that the drink was to be included with her meal. He looks at me blankly and then asks “Do you want a drink now?”

    “Umm, no, she had the tea with her meal, but you charged for it.”

    “Oh, the tea.”

    “Yes, she asked if she could get that with her kids meal…”

    “Do you want me to take it off the bill?”

    “That would be great. Thank you very much.”

    Cheerfully, “You’re welcome!”

    I smiled.