Wednesday, November 14, 2007
A Dog Named "Stella"...
11/14/2007
I have hesitated writing anything about The Dog named Stella and her visit with The Nancy and me, but my daughter Michelle is shaming me into doing this. So, let’s start off with a little history and a smidgen of background.
Stella came to live at the Farm sometime in or around October 1, 2005. The idea was for Stella to grace our home for a few of months. The “couple of months” turned into almost two years, and had Stella not sustained a little injury and be in need of lot of TLC just about the time Michelle moved from an apartment to a house, she might be with The Nancy and me, still.
My photograph and bio will never show up in the “Animal Lovers Hall of Fame.” It just isn’t in my nature. Now I could never be cruel to an animal; that also is not part of my nature. Hell, I don’t even eat the damn things, but having animals in my home is not thrilling to me, either. I can take them or leave them, and if I have my druthers, I’d leave them to someone else.
So here’s the thing: The Nancy and I have a cat. The cat tolerates me, but loves The Nancy. Stella, on the other hand, became my girl-buddy. She followed me everywhere. If I moved from one room to another, it wouldn’t be long before she came to where I happened to be. If I went to the basement, Stella wouldn’t follow me, but I would find her very often at the top of the steps when I would come back up them. Saturday and Sunday mornings when I got up (and The Nancy slept in with orders not to be awakened under any circumstances on penalty of death) Stella would follow me to the car and ride with me on the seven-mile trip to Sheetz (gas station) for coffee and a newspaper. When I cut the grass and moved around the Farm on my lawn mower, Stella would follow and lay in the shade of a tree watching me until I moved to another section, then she would tag along and do her thing again. Stella loved the Farm, but rarely wandered more then a couple of hundred feet from the house, unless The Nancy and I took a walk in the paths through the fields. Stella loved to tag along and loved to take a swim in the lake as we passed by it. She became my shadow.
Stella was a pain in the ass. She threw up on the carpet, spread black hair all over the house, though she never got up on the furniture. She smelled like a mildewed, black blanket, and she was always licking on me because I know she knew I didn’t like to be licked. She has breath so bad that it could take the paint off any surface. She busted the screens out of two doors on our front porch. She scratched up doors when she wanted in the house, and we had to have our carpets cleaned twice to rid them of her puke spots and oily dirt spots where she like to plant her overweight body and sleep. Yep! She was a pain in the ass.
The part of this that is inexplicable to me, and solely the result of propinquity, is that relationship between that old dog and me grew into a love affair. Stella now resides with Michelle and her step sister and brother (Gypsy and Rambo). I believe she is in a better place now where she can spend her last days in a very loving household with her buds. I will miss her at times. I know this because Saturday and Sunday mornings aren’t quite the same any longer. My daughter shamed me into writing this, but the shame is just my not wanting to have to admit to anyone that this Hell of a Guy could possibly miss an old dog named Stella.
And that is all I have to say about that…
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Dinner From Hell or In It...
11/11/2007
People who really know me know I rarely complain; well, I rarely complain and mean it, is what I want to get across. In my sixty-three+ years, I have probably complained about restaurant food and service (or non-service, in this case) perhaps one or two other times. I do not get upset easily. A dinner at The Feed Store restaurant in Atlanta – actually College Park – may have changed my ways.
Last Monday I took eleven guests to what I thought was a quaint, small town eatery. I checked out the menu, read about the dishes and even drove by it to check it out. The restaurant was cute, well maintained - it appeared to be clean and neatly kept, as far as I could see peering through the windows. The experience fell far short of my dream.
My group arrived at The Feed Store feeling chipper and ready for a sumptuous meal along with a couple of drinks to wash it down. The chipper soon moved to somber as we were seated and seemingly ignored. Now, neither I nor the group was in a hurry, it was just a little before seven, and we had plenty of time. The problem began when we went from our time to theirs – the minutes seemed to stretch into hours and it was more than obvious the server was either slower than molasses (she seemed to disappear a lot) or was overwhelmed.
The reservation was under my name, so, I sat at the head of the table. I told Bright Girl the Server Extraordinaire, I was paying the bill. She asked if “I” would like to purchase appetizer samplers for the table, neglecting to tell me if I approved it would cost me $13.00 ahead for them. All of you know I do not eat critter, and very frankly, there ain’t any appetizers I would pay $13.00 ahead for at any restaurant, in light of the fact that a meal was to follow. I asked her to ask each guest if he/she would care for an appetizer. Apparently, she asked one of them if she should just bring appetizer samplers to the table and someone said okay; however, she didn’t bother asking the payer if this was okay. This is where the evening went awry and very much downhill.
I did get a kick out of one of my guys when finally, having been in the restaurant for nearly two hours, his entrée made it to the table. As his plate was set down in front of him he gasped. The portion was so small he asked Wonder Woman when his real entrée was coming. We got a hardy laugh about his meal as the server was screwing me by adding some forty drinks to the bill at a cost of $324.25. After a two and a half hour ordeal (most waiting for our meals to come out of the kitchen one-by-one), server girl brought me my bill. I was shocked and dismayed. The bill was for $1014.90. I got upset and it did little other than send the restaurant staff scattering throughout the restaurant and as far away as they could hide. No one came to her aid as I questioned the cost, especially the $156.00 for appetizers. I got nowhere. The ship was sinking and the crew abandoned the captain.
Now I know it sounds as if I am dwelling on this, but actually, other than doing this because I e-mailed the restaurant’s owner (who hasn’t had the decency to even tell me to shove it) to let her know I would blast her establishment on my website so none of my 65,000 readers will ever grace her doorstep. Having said that, I am completely over the worst restaurant experience of my entire life, which includes the crappy food I had to eat in school.
My advice to you is to never go to The Feed Store in College Park, GA; that is if I like you. If you are one of the few people on this planet I cannot stand to be around (dammit, I cannot think of any) go to this place and tell them the guy they screwed sent you. Thank you for your support.
And that is all I have to say about that…
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
A Lady in Spain and a Dancing Baby
10/31/2007
There is a ninety-five year old woman blogger in Spain. She writes about current everyday stuff and ruminates on her life’s path. The subject and content of her posts move from the nostalgic to the poignant, and the sublime to the far out. She speaks of today’s fashions and her past loves, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how often she puts up new stories, but to date – eight months into her blogging – she has accumulated over 350,000 hits. That’s friggin’ incredible until you think about the crying Brittany Spears fan, the “Leave Brittany alone!” nut who got three million hits with his tirade on UTube in just one day. Now I feel badly. I thought I was doing well with nearly 64,000 in a little over a year and half. I am nothing, a nobody. Bottom line here: You all are going to have to pick it up a little bit. I need more hits to be somebody in this world. Especially since my plea for money didn’t get very far, leaving me in a position of having to work for a few more years.
This morning I listened to a news story where some lady posted a video of her baby bouncing to some music you cannot make out but supposedly is Prince. The company that produced the music is now suing this woman for copyright infringement. She got 180,000 hits on this video. She gets to be famous and so does her dancing baby. She was on Fox this morning, for crying out loud. I can’t even get my picture in the Post Office…well, maybe I could.
What am I, chopped liver? Let’s pick it up out there. You got nothing better to do (or you’d be reading this), so “X” out of here and sign back on three or four times. Let’s get this count up and make me somebody?
And that is all I have to say about that…
Thursday, October 25, 2007
A Magnet for Weirdos...
10/25/2007
Is there a sign on my back that says “I love weirdos?” What is it about me that draws these people to me?
Tuesday evening I was at a nice little micro-brewery in Berea, Ohio, enjoying a beer at a really nice bar; a classy little place. I had had a good meal with some friends and had actually left the restaurant when I realized I had left my cell phone on the table, and went back to into the restaurant retrieve it. After not finding the cell phone at the table, but instead locating it in my back pocket where it obviously was hiding all the time, and knowing I was only heading back to my hotel room with absolutely nothing to do but watch the tube, I decided to have one more beer. (A side note: The Cornerstone Brewery has an outstanding IPA called Seven, if you are interested. Seven has an IBU of 91 and an ABV of 7.5. Bud Light has an IBU of 4.) I bellied up to the bar, these days it touches the bar long before the rest of me arrives, and ordered the beer. I had planned to savor it and enjoy kicking back with no place to go and no one to see.
Exactly how the conversation with the guy sitting two stools to my right got started, I am not sure, but it didn’t take long to enter The Twilight Zone, that is for sure. Something was said about age, and then the young man sitting near to me said something about it being special to have been born at a time to be able to live in two millennia. Dive! Dive! Danger, Will Robinson! Abandon the ship! Let’s get out of here, Tonto! Run for your lives! Beam me up, Scotty! This is where it got weird.
I told him I have grandchildren that were born in the 90’s and I believe that, with today’s quality of life and advances in medicine, they could very possibly live to see 2100. “Won’t happen,” he says. So the obvious question from me is, why not?
“Mr. Conspiracy Theorist” then goes into a dissertation on the Government’s programs designed to shorten our lives. Programs either approved by or concocted by the government to put products in the market place that deliberately make us obese and unhealthy. All in the name of profit. Profit for companies and profit for the medical community. In essence, the government wants us dead.
Bullshit, I say. Where in the hell did you come up with that nonsense? He tells me he has seen the reports (all the while I am thinking he read this in the National Enquirer or some other “newspaper”). My man is definitely out there. In addition to making no sense at all, “Intellecto Man” had just a little difficulty forming words. There was very definite slurring going on. But he was entertaining. I was just about to start to egg him on about his thoughts on manned moon missions, the World Trade Center disaster and the Holocaust when a guy came in and sat down on the stool between us. It pretty much ended the conversation, so I finished my beer, but couldn’t resist telling the guy on my way out that I hope he enjoyed “day out.” I think he was too gone to get it.
I have added this one to my collection of characters met on the Road of Life. They are my entertainment and, perhaps, I am theirs. I’ve written before of my belief we are all connected, and I know I don’t meet these people by accident. I gave this young man my card with this website address on it. So I will end this post with a message to him should he read it… Thanks buddy, for the conversation and the laughs. You seem like a very nice young man but your thinking is a little warped…and I get that you are headed for a life of misery and paranoia. God bless you and protect you from the Government.
And that is all I have to say about that…