Narrative Not Needed

Sunday’s Accomplishments

Ah Sunday, you sly little trickster. You bill yourself as a day of rest, but really I find myself working like a dog. Again. If only the folks who run the physical plant would realize how many of us professors wander into our building on the weekends. Seriously, I am freezing my ass off in here.

Ridiculously Rude. Seriously Incompetent.

Ah, my little city of Sorta’ Cosmopolitan. Although you have a certain Midwestern charm — falling leaves on a crisp autumn day, budding dogwoods in the spring — winter is a cruel and charmless season. Your overcast skies make me feel all crummy inside. Your tendency towards icy pelts of rain does not make up for the few times that you send fluffy snowflakes from the skies. Your city fathers (and mothers) have no common sense. They stick medians in stupid places (and I was glad to see that TQE thinks the same thing!) and forget to install streetlights. They reward environmentally incorrect behavior by promoting sprawl while hiring unqualified folks to run the mass transit system. Even though you try to be cosmopolitan (B- for effort, but keep working at it), the fact that we probably have one Chinese buffet for every 100 citizens does not make you a real city. And the service staff at your local restaurants? Ridiculously rude. Seriously incompetent. Actually, that should probably be the city’s motto.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay, I might be overstating it a bit by nominating such a mean city motto. And today, quite surprisingly, I can hear the birds chirping outside my office window. There’s snow on the way (at least that’s what the weatherman says), but for now I am toasty in my drafty old house. Yet, I am sure that there are lots and lots of people in this city who will agree my commentary on the service situation in this freakin’ town. Actually, they already did when I twitted that I stranded at a local O’Charleys because our waitress forgot about us.

The Coach and I had big plans. We were going to see a matinée of Crazy Heart yesterday after TQE left for a larger metropolitan area. I had already had mediocre service the night before when TQE and I went to this funky local steakhouse [1], so I probably should have guessed that a new streak of suck ass service was about to descend upon me. I’m going to blame it on the fact that we had a surprisingly good breakfast at the “shinny dinny” which obscured the fact that most servers (with the exception of my students) suck in this town.

Anyways, The Coach wanted O’Charleys because it was on the way to the west side movie theatre (where all restaurants are chains of one kind or another). We walked in the front door and approached the hostess stand.

Let me see if we have any tables available,” said the hostess as she wandered to the back of the nearly deserted restaurant.

As we were standing there, puzzled expressions on our face because there were cleaned tables everywhere, another hostess approached us and asked us to sit in the bar. The Coach explained that the one girl was already in the process of seating us — so this other woman took us back to the table. We were given menus, placed our drink orders, and made comfortable. Someone took our food orders. The tables behind us cleared out. A shift change occurred. Our food eventually came out, a waitress was corralled for drink refills, and then: 

 **POOF!**

She disappeared, never to be seen again. We waited. And waited. And waited. No one came back. I tweeted and then I updated my status on Facebook. No waitress. We talked about The Coach’s new duties as department chair (oh yes, we are POWERFUL people at Chez Disenchanted). No waitress. Our glasses were drained, the ice was rattled. No waitress. A dine and dash was contemplated. No waitress. The Coach looked at his watch, again and again, while other wait staff walked past. Still no waitress.

We missed our movie before someone finally wandered close enough to our table for us to talk about the situation. She asked us to describe our waitress and then went looking for her. She never found her. Seriously? Was this woman kidnapped by aliens? Could she have been sucked into a black hole created by a cyclotron? Did she succumb to early onset Alzheimer’s? I guess we’ll never know. It took a manager to liberate our bill from the computer system. I know, because I saw him do it after having a conversation with the girl who noticed us sitting there. Of course, the manager never apologized.

We left a 53 cent tip.

And O’Charleys? You’ve been added to our Sorta’ Cosmopolitan restaurant blacklist. We won’t be back.

Just once …

… I would like someone to do their job right. If I didn’t have a skirt on, I’d sit on my floor and start chanting “Om.” Oh well, at least it’s Friday, right? And I have company and fun plans for tonight.

iFondle or iTampon?

So, I did our taxes over the weekend and we’re getting a massive tax return, in the $6K range (including our state taxes). So far, I have the following plans:

• Pay off the fancy new fridge before the “no payments, no interest” deal runs out.
• Set aside some money to pay for our summer trip to New York (I’m not teaching until Summer III, so my extra $$ will be used to fund our vacation in Summer 2011).
• New flooring for our bedroom (Do It Yourself Project).
• A new bed because our old one makes my whole body hurt — and there’s not enough room for me, The Coach, and whatever mix of critters decides to sleep with us on a given night.

But, I’m going to have a little money left over to play with. Now, I have thought about buying a new digital camera, but I can’t decide what I want, so I am going to wait until my old one dies. Then, I’ll use some of my summer teaching money to get a new one. That leaves me with the following dilemma:

Do I want an iTouch or an iPad?

For the record, I am never getting an iPhone because I am sick of ATT. Our cell service has been shit ever since the 3G revolution started. Oh, and I just bought a netbook, so I’m not sure if an iPad would be redundant (although its screen is a hell of a lot bigger than the one on my Dell mini).

Note: I offered to buy The Coach a new Nano (since it has an FM receiver in it). He told me to buy him a $19 radio instead. He says we already have too many iPods floating around between my old pink mini which he just replaced the battery in, the red nano that I now use, and cheap green shuffle that I bought to take to Peru.

Memories of my Youth

The Varsity … now in the Atlanta Suburbs 

 I’ve been playing around with writing this blog entry for some time now. I mean, it’s been almost a month since The Coach, the Russells (Breath of Death and the Tenure Puppy), and I ventured down south so I could give my paper at a regional conference. Of course, I’ve been busy as hell — being department chair is no picnic, my friends — and the beginning of the semester was just crazy, seeing how I was bombarded with bad students, procrastinating students, needy colleagues, two searches (one still ongoing), and budget proposals to develop. Hell, I still haven’t completed my faculty annual report, but I recently learned that chairs don’t have to turn those in until mid-February or so. Plus, I really have been working on at least one of my new semester’s resolutions, even though there are days that my life feels like this cartoon from Ph.D. Comics. 

But, enough complaining. 

I consider myself a southern gal, seeing how I spent the majority of my formative years in Irondale, Alabama. You probably recognize that place, especially if you’re a fan of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Even now, even though I’ve been exiled to the midwest for most of the past two decades, I still think of myself as a southerner. While there are some things that are better about living in the midwest — such as, people are fairly direct in their rudeness as opposed to the sickly sweet, quite puzzling, super annoying indirect rudeness that southerners seem to have ingrained in their soul [1] — southern food knocks the socks off anything that one might call midwestern cuisine. In fact, I am hard-pressed to identify a distinct midwestern food culture unless you count starchy Amish food (all noodles and potatoes) or the sausages that people tend to pass off as German food. 

I still have dreams about Milo’s hamburgers, Golden Rule BBQ, Sneaky Pete’s hotdogs, and those glorious staples of true southern food — okra and fried green tomatoes. Every time we go through Birmingham on our way down to New Orleans, we plan our trip to hit at least one of these places. The food brings back a lot of childhood memories, ranging from alone time with my dad eating hot dogs to hanging out at Milo’s after taking my senior exams. We’d go to the Golden Rule after softball games and pee-wee football games, dressed in our uniforms and cheerleading gear (yes, I was a cheerleader – don’t judge me). These were the happy times before my father lost his job, then his wife, then his dignity after he was sequestered to a nursing home as a quadriplegic. This is the way I want to remember my dad, cheerful and happy, acting younger than his age, and being a bit of an asshole when he coached us kids. 

 As the daughter of divorced parents, I would spend every summer visiting my mother’s parents (remember, my mother disappeared when I was nine, only to show up again when I was 21, but that’s a story for another blog entry). Until I was old enough to change planes by myself, my father would drive me to Atlanta to catch a direct flight to Burlington, VT. These trips to the airport usually involved stopping at my stepmother’s cousin’s bowling alley or a day at Six Flags or shopping in the big city malls. They also included trips to The Varsity. So, you can imagine my joy when I learned that The Varsity had added a couple of locations in the outskirts of Atlanta! [2] 

The food was just as good as I remembered. The Coach went for the chili burgers, while I chose the hot dogs. On our first trip — yes, we ate at two different locations, on two different days — I went for the slaw dogs. On the second day, knowing it would be a long time before we went back to Atlanta, I had the chili cheese slaw dogs. Oh my god(dess), they are heaven on a bun. I love that chili — it’s probably the best chili I’ve had on a hot dog with the exception of the sauce at Gene’s Michigan Stand in Port Henry, New York.

Here’s a little side note — when I was a kid my grandmother would buy a bunch of Gene’s and freeze them so I could have them if I visited over Christmas break. And yes, I still dream about those hot dogs!

What is it about food that brings back memories? Sitting there in a suburban branch of The Varsity, I told The Coach about my one of the funniest moments I had ever had in Atlanta. You see, my dad, bless his poor dead heart, was a good man — and he was fairly tolerant of us kids unlike my stepmother who would pull our ears, pinch the fatty parts of our arms, and threaten to make us “pick a switch” when we were twitchy. He really was a bit of a pushover. He’d pay for us to take our friends on trips with us, loading our old wood-sided Chevy Caprice station wagon to the gills.

So, on this one trip to Six Flags, the car was loaded down with my father and stepmother, my older male cousins Pat and Troy, me, my two younger stepsisters, and the little boys who lived downstairs from us in our old apartment (this was the year before my dad bought our house in Irondale). If you’re counting that’s seven kids, ranging in age from 17 to 4. None of us looked alike — my cousins look like their dad, I look like my dad, my stepsisters looked like their dad, and those boys from downstairs had carrot orange hair (much, much brighter than my strawberry blonde). Anyways, we went to The Varsity for hot dogs and burgers, seven kids of all shapes, shades, and sizes. The waitress looked at my dad and said: “Hon, are all these kids yours?”

As my dad pulled out his wallet, he looked over this ragtag batch of kids and sighed. “Yes, yes they are,” he said.

Let’s just say, those hot dogs brought back an image of my dad that I hadn’t thought about in a while. They’re magical, even though the nitrates might kill you.

This Week’s Prospective View of Hell

This is the reason my house is a filthy, filthy pig sty. I really need to get a cleaning lady (or man – I’m not sexist). Look below the break, if you dare …

Breaking News …

The automated phone message system from The Coach’s school called the house at 6 p.m. to let us know that school is cancelled for Monday. Why? Because the parking lots are not plowed. I’d mock this, but I’m just too amazed to make fun of Those People Down South.

Working Weekend? Not!

On Friday, I packed up all my stuff so I could work at home. Yeah, you try working at home with four cats and three dogs all demanding your attention. It doesn’t work well. Instead, I ended up balancing the checkbook, filing my federal taxes, going shopping at Target (buying an automatic cat box to make The Coach’s life a little easier), and eating Thai food. I also ended up watching Rushmore (I’m on a Wes Anderson kick) and making a huge dent in Stasiland, a book recommended by TQE. I played on Facebook (Mousehunt, anyone?) and posted pictures and video of the Tenure Puppy on Flickr.

Obviously, I needed to get out of my house, so The Coach helped me get the 7″ of snow off of the ’stang so I could go to the office. Of course, now that I am here, I haven’t accomplished much. Sure, I stopped at the bank to deposit a reimbursement check. I wrote a couple blog entries for later this week. I sent my stepmother an email with a link to the puppy playing in the snow. Oh, and I played with my friend’s dog, Coyote (not her real name, but she sure does look like one), because she was in the hallway.

I need to buckle down and get my behind in gear if I am going to have time to have fun with TQE when he visits later this week.

Update below the break …

Puppy’s first real snow day

The snow came 12 hours late, making The Coach’s day off seem silly (prophylactic cancellation). And, when it finally got here, we got way more than the 1 – 2″ inches previously expected (I’ve heard between 7 and 8 1/2″ this a.m.). But, hey, the tenure puppy loves it.