Tag: friends

  • What’s Cooking?

    One of my many happy things about being back in the Los Angeles area, is the food. I missed the restaurants, but I also missed the produce and the ethnic markets fiercely.

    Lately I’ve been enjoying garden bounty: Squash from one person with an overflowing garden. Lemons from another with heavy trees. Tomatoes from a friend who is growing more than her household will eat.

    It is such a wonderful thing. Because it is fresh, the flavor and nutritional values are higher. Because it is free, the financial benefit is awesome. Because it is what is available right then, it forces me to think of ways to make use of them, which often leads to meals I wouldn’t normally think to shop for.

    Most of all, for me, food is so much about caring. When the ingredients are gifted to me through my network of human connections and interactions, it ties me to the positive. As I cook, I think of where ingredients came from. I think of whom they are going to feed. I think about ingredients loved by people I love. I think of the last time I prepared a dish, and who I fed that time, or of whom I would like to feed with it. I follow the threads in my mind as I chop and mix and sample.

    Onions and cucumbers came from the CSA last week, and my daughter requested a cucumber salad. As I prepared it I thought back two summers to being in New York City, when a different CSA delivery led to a different cucumber salad. It was prepared by a dear friend as we worked together in the kitchen to create a feast from CSA items and food treasures collected at a nearby market. I know this is part of why my daughter wanted the salad too, because of her memory of that NYC salad, and because the friend was extra on our mind because she had a birthday this week. Every future cucumber salad will always remind both of us, of that one, and no other will ever be quite as good, because some food moments are so right.

    With my bounty of tomatoes I made gazpacho, which is pretty much a perfect summer treat. It makes some use of the lemons as well. Lemons can be used pretty much daily in cooking, especially during the summer, which is the perfect time for multiple salads. Anything to stay cooler.

    I’ve been cooking on the grill a lot lately, even things I wouldn’t normally cook on the grill (like banana bread). This is because it is fuck-all hot and I don’t want to heat the kitchen up further. The rest of the tomatoes I slow cooked into a delicious tomato sauce using the grill. I suppose all this unattended cooking out there could eventually lead to my house burning down, but whatever, in Southern California I can survive without housing longer than I can survive without food.

    Half of the tomato sauce is in the freezer waiting for another use. The other half, I simmered ground and seasoned lamb patties in. Those I served over portabella mushrooms, stuffed with a mixture of spinach, goat cheese, extra garlic, basil, and pine nuts (and cooked on the grill, of course). The abundance of squash has been sliced up, lightly salted, spritzed with ACV and grilled. Everything gets grilled.

    The heat has been leading to a desire for cooler and more refreshing cocktails as well. I brought home mint the other day so the bartender could make me mojitos. The peels from the cucumbers for the cucumber salad, I used to flavor vodka overnight, along with mint sprigs. Then that made cucumber mint spritzers the next night.

    The heat wave finally broke yesterday, after a week of evil yellow ball in the sky trying to kill us all weather. It is still summer though. It will still be a grilled dinner tonight with refreshing cold side dishes and beverages, just with less lethargy and overheated misery.

  • Disconnected

    I’m finding it difficult to find any enthusiasm within me for G+, despite being a borderline Google fangirl. For a long time I was very anxious for a viable facebook alternative.

    The thing is, I don’t think I even want an alternative to facebook anymore. I just feel so incredibly done with social networking as a THING.

    I don’t need a “social networking” site. I need a “hermit occasionally bump into other people and maybe share a jug of moonshine” site.

    But, let’s pretend that I am open to using something vaguely social still.

    I would need G+ to integrate with Google Reader in a smooth and significant way.

    I would need to be able to EASILY mark things as read. The current Mute is too many steps. Plus, I’d like to be able to mark as Read, but show me again if new content is added.

    I’d need some way of labeling or tagging content, both purposeful tagging by the author based on topics, and autotagging by G+ based on type (a link post versus a photo post versus a shared post) so that I could filter reading lists based on both circles and content type. Some people I am very interested in their original content, but really don’t want to see the 100s of goofy links they post per day.

    Mostly though, I am tired. I am old. I’ve been living a very rich and dear to me online life since before the web existed. Quite frankly, the more sites rise up to connect us to people, the less I feel truly connected to the people who actually matter most to me.

    My month long dumb phone experiment has stretched into a month and a half with me hardly blinking. Rather than chomping at the bit to hurry and get a new smart phone, I feel half tempted to give up my laptop instead.

  • I’m Not Good at Acceptance

    During our dark first year in Minnesota, a very good friend of mine died.  I was in Minnesota, and he was far away in California, and he died.

    I spent a little tiny bit of time in denial. Then I moved on to anger and stayed there for a while. Then I moseyed on in to the deep valley of depression, where I’ve spent large chunks of my life anyway. I just walked in a lot farther than I’d been in quite a while, and I set up housekeeping, with no particular intention of ever walking back out.

    I was not wallowing in grief. I was mainly too numb to bother with grief. Flashes of rage aside, mostly I simply put away the fact he is dead in a box in the back of the closet. It isn’t the same as denial. I know he is dead. On a day to day basis, I long ago stopped needing to remind myself I couldn’t call him. It just wasn’t fully integrated into my world either. Like everything else from my old life, my real life, it was just on hold.

    Which leaves me in an interesting position now that I am back “home” because I am drinking in all the sights and sounds and smells of my old stomping grounds, and there is always something there to remind me.

    Which means the box has come out of the closet and I am needing to deal with the full blown reality that he will never go to any of our favorite restaurants with me again. He’ll never annoy the shit out of me with his bizarre ordering quirks again. We’ll never be sneaking the back way between the valleys to avoid the freeway traffic, spending the whole drive deeply engaged in meaningful and meaningless conversation again.

    Yeah. Turns out I’m still really pissed off about him dying.

  • Playing Catch Up – Part I

    So, a lot has been happening, and none of that has been blogging.

    I moved. I don’t live in Minnesota any longer. We moved back to Los Angeles.

    It has been pure hell, but all in all, it is a very good thing. I am glad we made the decision that we did. I’m glad we moved. It’s just that moving sucks.

    We knew for a while. My husband gave a month’s notice at work, but they didn’t want him to share the news right away, and while they can’t enforce that, we decided to give them some breathing room, and we kept it quiet for a reasonable amount of time. By the time it became more public, I was simply too busy to blog about it.

    Leaving Minnesota was difficult. It was emotionally difficult and physically difficult. I wanted to move back to California, but in the two and a half years we spent in Minnesota, we’d made some good friends. I’d also put a lot of time and heart into working with ACT V. Friends that I made, I can keep. That is what the internet is for. It’s very difficult to continue fostering for an organization I was very happy to be volunteering for, from 2000 miles away.

    Speaking of 2000 miles…

    ROAD TRIP.

    Ugh.

    Big. FAT. UGH!

    2 cars + 4 humans + 2 cats + 2 dogs + 2000 miles = STRESS

    To start things off, when we took the cars in for an oil change and a quick checkup, the mechanic discovered stuff wrong with one of them. Stuff that should be fixed before the road trip, and stuff that cost a bunch of dollars, because it always costs a bunch of dollars when the mechanic says “Well, we found…”

    This got us on our road trip later than originally planned.

    That, and our own insanity, but that’s another issue.

    Seriously, we left our rental house at 11:30 PM. I know, I know, logically it seems like it would make more sense to just sleep there one more night, but it we just needed to go, or we’d find more reasons to linger the next morning.

    So, we left our former home a total mess (because we knew that a wonderful friend had our back on dealing with the MN end), and we drove by the house of one of the ACT V people to deposit a final donation of blankets and detergent on their doorstep (much to the suspicion of some neighbors that saw us).

    Then we headed out of town…

    In a snow storm.

    I’m not kidding. It snowed on us on the way out of Minnesota. We pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion and got our butts to Iowa, so that we had left the state. There we stayed at Microtel Inn in Clear Lake that didn’t charge us any extra fees for the pets, and had a very nice and accommodating staff. Unfortunately it was also snowing and hailing on us in Clear Lake as we tried to unload the cars and get our butts into the room. In order to have enough space in the cars (because we needed room for 4 people, 2 traumatized cats, 1 large kitty litter, 1 cranky old dog, 1 puppy, food for all the critters, and a disturbing amount of wine, not for road trip consumption), we’d purchased a giant duffel bag to keep luggage in.

    It turns out it takes about an hour to get 4 people, 2 dogs, 2 cats, and all the stuff the 8 of them need for one stupid night, settled into a motel room.

    Did I mention the snowing and hailing? Oh, well also there was horrible biting, bitter, nasty, COLD wind. It was late April. We were dressed (and packed) for early spring. My husband got himself a minor case of frost bite on his fingers unloading the car that first night. Good times.

    The next morning I set out our plan for the day by finding a motel that would take the pets and plotting our route. I’d been planning originally on aiming for 500 miles a day, but decided that day to stretch and reserve us a room just over 600 miles away, because of our late start and our race to get to California before we got charged extra by the movers for not being able to meet them on time to get our ginormous amount of stuff back.

    So, we were aiming for Sterling, CO and Best Western Sundowner, which charged us an extra $20 to let our pets stay there ($12 for one animal, $20 for two or more), but had a larger room for the price than our other options, and after the first night, I knew we’d do better with a little extra space.

    We got on the road planning to be in our room by about 10:30 PM. Unfortunately, it was an extremely windy day, and we hadn’t really perfected our strapping the giant duffel bag to the top of the car technique yet. It took all day to get that technique down. In total, about 3 hours was spent in various parking lots, rest areas (BTW, Iowa has the nicest rest areas I have ever seen.), and wide shoulders, working on that technique. This meant we got to the motel about 1:30 AM.

    Watson at one of the rest area stops in Iowa.

    Remember the one hour to get everybody settled in the room thing? It takes even longer when you are on the second floor of a Best Western that doesn’t have an elevator. WTF? Also, their free wireless internet sucked frozen possum testicles, or as I like to call them, possnutsicles. I needed internet in order to send a very detailed email to a friend, including floorplans of our house that I’d edited to map out the placement of all of our furniture. The movers had made amazingly good (not good for us) time getting the load to CA, and the path of least resistance for dealing with that, was to have a friend manage the unloading of the stuff. Between the battling with the internet, the super slow connection, and the occasionally drifting off between keystrokes, I finally hit send and got to sleep at 5:30 AM. Then up early to battle the internet again in order to find the right stopping place for the night. By the time we were ready to head out, I was 31 flavors of cranky.

    Now we’ll pause for a message from our sponsors. Actually, we’ll pause so I can sleep. You’ll have to wait for another day to find out more about our road trip.

  • And Then There Were None

    Do you hear that?

    The house is so quiet.

    It makes me feel anxious, because I haven’t done anything for the puppies lately, so they should be noisily complaining, and the silence leaves me with a repetitive flutter in my gut that something is wrong.

    Yesterday, I dropped my daughter off at a class and came home for an hour and a half of couch potato-ing before needing to pick her up again.  It was the first time I’ve been alone in the house without any other people since January 10th. Holy crap, that is a lot of people time for somebody like me. I couldn’t swim in the silence because of the feelings of puppy anxiety.

    Time for life to return to some value of normal. Whatever that means.

    Darby went home on Wednesday. On Thursday Mindy got sick. I called the vet and described the symptoms and she told me she was having a reaction to one of the vaccines. The vet came during her lunch hour to bring me some medicine for Mindy and an hour after she left Webster had symptoms too. On Saturday the call came from Darby’s family that she’d been sick for two days.

    The vet was not pleased, and called the manufacturer and is returning this particular batch. They were not violently ill, and are going to be fine, but it was frustrating and inconvenient, at the very least. Nothing like taking three totally healthy happy little puppies and making them all sick while trying to prevent them from getting sick to raise my stress level a bit.

    Webster was supposed to go home Saturday, but he ended up staying until Sunday so the vet could take a last look at him. I thought Mindy was going home on Sunday, but that was due to a typo (not mine) so she actually left yesterday.

    I guess the big happy news is that Mindy went to live in California. This is a long story.

    On July 13th, 1997, I met a family of three, and they rapidly became a very important part of my life. The female portion (D) of that trio has been mentioned in the past, for example, here and here. Their family of three turned into a family of 5 over the years. The three children have been asking for a dog, because that is what children do. D is not a dog person. She didn’t dislike dogs. She has taken care of my dogs for me when I needed it, and taken care of other people’s dogs, but she didn’t have any desire for her own dog.

    The kids swore that if they got a dog they would take care of EVERYTHING and D wouldn’t have to do anything. Right. Sure.

    Back in December my friend who took Ellie was going on vacation. She arranged for a petsitter to come and stay at her house to take care of her three dogs, but as the vacation approached, we realized that Ellie still wasn’t getting along well enough with one of her other dogs to make that a good idea. Trusting a pet sitter to deal with that kind of dynamic just wasn’t reasonable. However, the boarding situations available really were not ideal for Ellie. So, I asked D if she’d be willing to take Ellie in for a couple of weeks (paid, of course).

    D agreed. For one thing, Ellie needed it, and for another, we had a plan. She would assign the kids to take care of Ellie, with the promise of all that money at the end. The kids would not take care of Ellie, D would do it all and keep the money, then the next time the kids said “we’ll take care of EVERYTHING, you won’t have to do anything” she would feel less guilty for laughing in their little dog wanting faces.

    Ellie, no surprise, was a PITA. She got into the trash, because that is what Ellie does. Then her digestive system completely revolted, explosively, all over D’s carpet, because that is what digestive systems do when fed too much trash. Ellie was also absolutely sweet and adorable, because that is what Ellie is.

    Three weeks later when Ellie went home, instead of a long sigh of relief, D found herself missing her.

    Which is what led to her telling me she was thinking about getting a dog. I assigned her and the kids a bunch of reading. I went over the pros and cons of dog ownership. I asked her to make a list of what she was looking for in a dog. I warned her not to go out shopping for a dog, but instead to just be open to getting a dog when the right one came along. You don’t want to go out with the plan to pick a dog, because then you’ll simply pick the one there that comes the closest to being what you want. Instead, it is best to wait until the one that is actually right presents itself.

    So, she started reading her assigned homework. She made a list of things she wanted in a dog. The list included items like:

    • around 25 lbs
    • short hair that doesn’t shed much
    • an adult, about 2 or 3 years old

    Time passed. The right dog hadn’t presented itself yet, but she was taking my advice and not being in a rush.

    By the time Mindy was about 4 weeks old, her developing personality started speaking to me, and it kept telling me she’d fit in to that family really well. This was a silly notion, because she was:

    • expected to be about 50lbs
    • is a husky mix and will do so much more than just shed
    • is not going to be an adult for a couple of long destructive years

    I thought about it a couple more days, and then sent D an email, acknowledging all the bad, but explaining I had a feeling. She wrote back and said she’d been having the feeling too, from the first photos of the three of them.

    They talked it over and decided to fill out an application. Other local people applied for her too. We waited anxiously to find out what the rescue would decide.

    Mindy is an adorable and very adoptable little puppy. Ellie had been available for ages without any interest, and she had health conditions which made her less adoptable and made California a much more suitable climate for her. It is frightening to send a dog so far away. What if the new family changes their mind? It is especially iffy seeming when it comes to sending a dog to somebody who has never had a dog before.

    The rescue decided to trust my recommendation, for which I am very glad. Nobody wanted Mindy to be flying in cargo, so that means she needed to head out to California after she was old enough to fly, but before she got too big to qualify to go as carry-on. This left a very narrow window. D and her daughter came out for a long weekend, to get some how to care for a puppy training and to fly Mindy home with them.

    I was very anxious all afternoon yesterday while Mindy was in flight, but it turns out she did very well on the flight. The wait for the shuttle to the parking lot was a bit rougher (so noisy outside at LAX) and she cried and peed in her carrier. However, by last night she was safely at her new home and is getting settled. I know she’ll be very happy with them, they are really good family for this little people focused pup.

    Best of all, I will get to be in touch with Mindy for her whole life.

    There is stuff to say about Webster too, but that will wait for another post.

  • Volcano Lunch

    My birthday is next week and a friend of mine took me out for a mani/pedi and lunch yesterday as my gift. The mani/pedi went without incident. We sat next to each other in the massager chairs and tried to converse while people tickled our feet and manhandled us.

    For lunch we went to a sushi place that neither of us had been to before. Some people, especially when treating a friend to a birthday meal, might prefer to go with something “tried and true” but both of us enjoy checking out new restaurants in hopes of finding a new gem.

    This sushi place was chosen based on the fact it was very close to the nail salon and a couple of HER friends eat there regularly and like it.

    We arrived and were given a choice of sushi bar or table. I almost always prefer the bar, however it had been more than a month since the last time my friend and I had seen each other or really spoken. A lot had gone on in that month and we had things to talk about. Some of what I wanted to tell her about, I did not want people to overhear. We chose the table.

    They brought us menus and the sushi ordering form. We carefully opened the menus with our newly manicured and not really dry nails. The menu was the type that is filled to the brim with specialty rolls, a great many of them in combinations that have little thought put into them. Each roll was listed by number, name, ingredients, photo and price. It was a full color menu. It makes for a very crowded design, but gives you a decent idea of what you are ordering. We discussed our order and as we settled on what we wanted the waitress came by to check on us. We told her we had decided, but had not marked the sheet yet. She said she would do it for us.

    We ordered. We ordered by number, name, and pointing at the item on the menu. Triple specificity.

    #8 Crazy Boy
    #10 BSCR
    #11 Volcano Scallop
    #24 House Special
    #26 Sexy Roll
    #39 Sashimi Salad

    The waitress went to give our order to the sushi chef and we started to go over some of the topics we needed to cover.

    Before long the waitress reappeared announcing “Sexy Roll,” and placed it on the table. The overall presentation was not the same as in the photo, but I am fine with that. Each chef has a slightly different style for things and I do not expect plastic food that looks exactly the same. We dug in. It tasted good. We continued to talk.

    We were not finished with that roll when the waitress reappeared carrying two more items. “Crazy Boy,” she tells us. She pauses stressed because she is not sure where to put both plates down. Mind you, we are two people sitting at a 4 top and only have one item on the table so far, but it is apparently exactly where she wanted to put the other plates. I move what is left of the Sexy Roll and she puts down the Crazy Boy and the Sashimi Salad. She does not tell us the name of the Sashimi Salad since she had gotten distracted by the placement problem. I could easily tell what it was, because there was lettuce involved and there was nothing roll like involved in it, and everything else we ordered was a roll.

    Crazy Boy looked similar to the photo. Sashimi Salad did not. Again, I am not overly concerned with the look matching the photo, but when that difference in looks is caused by a change in ingredients, I am less excited. The Sashimi Salad in the photo has hunks of fresh fish, atop mixed greens with a non-creamy salad dressing. The mixed greens on our plate did have an oil and vinegar dressing on them, but the fish itself was tossed and slathered in creamy sauce. Had that information been on the menu in some form, I would have told them to leave it off. I made a mental note to be sure to alter the order if I ever came again. I was in no mood to complain, and just wanted to get back to our chat. I didn’t eat any of the Crazy Boy, but my friend liked it.

    A different waitress brought two more plates, announcing, “Scallop Roll and Lobster Roll,” as we made room for them on the table. My friend and I exchange looks and stare at the plates. (Huh?)

    I stopped her, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we ordered a Lobster Roll, and this Scallop Roll, is it the BSCR, or the Volcano?”

    “It’s the Volcano,” she informs us. “You ordered the Lobster Roll, right?”

    “No, I don’t think so.” (No, I definitely did not order the Lobster Roll. Nothing we said SOUNDS like Lobster Roll.)

    She goes to get the waitress who took our order and they consult the piece of paper and come over to the table.

    The waitress we ordered from says, “You don’t want it?”

    “Well, we didn’t order it.”

    “Sorry,” she tells us as the other waitress takes it and gives it back to the chef.

    I point to the roll on the table and inquire, “Is this the Volcano Roll?” I am asking again because it does not look like what I was expecting.

    “No,” she tells me, “it is the BSCR.”

    “Okay, the other lady said it was the Volcano. So the Volcano is still coming?” I ask.

    She looks at me confused, “You want the Volcano?” My friend and I exchange looks. (What’s happening?)

    “Yes, we ordered it, right?” The waitress looks at the piece of paper and nods and walks back to talk to the chef. My friend and I start up our conversation again expecting the rest of our order soon, but we only get a few words in before the other waitress interrupts again.

    “Do you want the Volcano?” she asks. My friend and I look at each other again. (Obviously somebody is confused. Is it us?)

    “Yes, that’s the spicy one, right?. We like spicy things.” I tell her.

    “Oh, you like the spicy sauce?”

    “Yes.” I smile at her encouragingly. She goes away and talks to the chef again and we get back to our conversation.

    In a flash, she returns. “You want the Volcano Roll too?” My friend and I exchange looks again. o.O

    “Right, we still have two more rolls coming, right? How many rolls did we order?”

    She looks at the paper, “Six. So you’re okay? You want 2 more?”

    “We’ve had four so far, right?” I say, trying to get us all on the same page. She nods. “So you are bringing two more? We still need the Volcano Roll and the House Roll?” At this point everything seems questionable.

    “Okay.” She goes back to talk to the chef again, and once again we try to get back to our conversation.

    She brings us a roll that looks ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like any of the photos of what we ordered, not even close. “House Roll,” she announces and sets it on the table. The House Roll on the menu was a roll completely covered with three kinds of chopped up raw fish GOODness. This thing was a small, very plain roll with two types of fish, all wrapped inside. My friend and I look at each other. (WTF?)

    “Can I see what we ordered?” I gesture toward the paper. She hands me the paper.

    I look over the checked boxes.

    #8 Crazy Boy
    #10 House Roll
    #11 BSCR…

    What? These numbers do not match up with the menu numbers. Also the prices on this piece of paper are all considerably higher. For instance this #10 House Roll is $9.75 instead of $7.75.

    I look down the rest of the sheet and see a mark by #26 Sexy Roll. #24 is not called the House Roll and is not marked. Written at the bottom in a box is Volcano Roll and Sashimi Salad.

    “Oh, House Roll on the menu is number 24, and this looks different,” I mention.

    The waitress nods happily, “We changed it, but I checked the right name.” I smile at her. She smiles back. “The BSCR and the Volcano Roll are the same,” she tells me. My smile fades.

    “What? They are not the same on the menu.” I point out.

    “Just two different names. They are the same. See, BSCR is short for it. B. S. C. R. It is the initials,” she explains cheerfully to me. “See? That’s why the chef is confused.”

    My friend and I look at each other again. (B S C R is short for for Volcano Roll, yes, it all makes perfect sense now.)

    “But they are different on the menu, the Volcano Roll is spicy. Also, the House Roll is different on the menu.”

    “Yes,” she agrees. “They have changed it. They have the wrong picture. We keep trying to tell them to change the menu.”

    The chef speaks now, “See? The Volcano Roll and Scallop Roll are the same.”

    “But, on the menu they are different.” I reply. I am not trying to be argumentative. I am speaking in a polite tone of voice and am genuinely feeling confused, sort of as if I have wandered into The Twilight Zone.

    “No,” he tells me.

    “No?” I ask.

    He motions at the waitress to bring him the menu. He looks at the menu. “See? It is the same. The BSCR has scallops, and the Volcano has scallops and lobster and spicy sauce. They are the same,” he states firmly.

    (Perhaps we do not have matching definitions of the word same. ) “Oh. Okay.” I tell him. (I don’t want to talk to you anymore.)

    “I can make it for you.”

    I glance at my friend and raise and eyebrow. Her answer is written on her face, as clearly as if she had used a Sharpie (OMFG Let’s just Get. Out. Of. Here.)

    “No thank you. I think we’ll be fine.” I tell the chef.

    “No, I can make it for you.”

    “No, it’s okay,” my friend tells him.

    “Are you sure?”

    “Yes. We’re fine. We’ll be fine with what we have. Thank you.” I respond.

    “What about the other one? You don’t like the other one?”

    “It’s fine.”

    He says something I can’t hear to the waitress and she shows him on the menu. He gestures toward our table. “Bring it here, I can make it like that.”

    “It’s okay. We’re fine, really.” (We just want to finish and go far away now.)

    They drop it and we try to go back to our conversation.

    A loud voice interrupts, “What’s wrong?”

    We look and another man has come out from the kitchen and is staring angrily at us.

    “Nothing, we’re fine. Just some confusion with the menu.”

    “What’s wrong?”

    “We’re fine now, everything is…”

    He cuts me off, “What’s wrong?!”

    The waitress steps in and starts talking to him. I cannot hear what she is saying, but he is sufficiently distracted.

    We go back to lunching and talking, but soon my friend interrupts me and says, “I think they are talking about us.” I glance back at the sushi bar. Both men have angry faces and are waving their hands around. The women are standing there looking uncomfortable. The men get louder and louder. Soon the men are yelling at each other. They are yelling loudly. They are yelling about us. The man from the kitchen yells at the man who made our food. This pisses our chef off and he begins to yell back about some other customer who was there earlier. They get louder and louder, and more and more angry. The women start arguing also, but not as loudly. I cannot make out what the women are saying. All four of them are just standing up at the bar arguing while we try to eat our lunch.

    Eventually the man who had been in the kitchen storms back into the kitchen in disgust. The other man begins to clean up his workspace with a vengeance, slamming and banging things. The waitress comes over to ask if we want anything else.

    My friend smiled, “Just our check, and a to go box, thank you.”

    My friend scooped into boxes, paid, and we left as quickly as possible. As we walked out the door the waitress called out, “Thank you! Come again!”


  • Two New Bitches

    My friend adopted two abused dogs last week, and today I got to go meet them for the first time. They are female, and about ten months old and were taken from an owner that was both physically abusive and neglectful. They were apparently skeletons with fur when the foster family got hold of them and have put on a lot of weight, which is frightening because they are both still so very skinny, although these photos don’t show it too much.

    Both dogs were interested in me if I was looking the other way, but any sign that I was aware of them sent them running away terrified. The first night at my friend’s house they were a mess but have settled in and absolutely adore her now. She is retired and has the time to devote to them that they are going to need. Their life started out very rough, but they have found a good home now.

    My post is really meant to be about my friend though, rather than about these two dogs.

    Last night I got an email from her which I will share here.

    I just went to get on the computer and one of the new cuties has chewed through the wire to the charger and the battery is almost dead. I don’t even know if I can get back on but if you can suggest the fastest and best way to get a charger I would be very very happy.
    Miss and love you

    She is incredibly patient, kind and generous and I absolutely love her. These dogs are lucky to have found a home with her and I consider it a great honor and a privilege that she is my friend.

    To all those people who are always taking advantage of her and treating her like crap, I think just about as highly of you as I do the original owner of these dogs.

    Pepper (name subject to change)

    Bonnie (name subject to change)

    Below is the original lady of the house who is doing very well with the two new interlopers.

    April