Week of Apr. 3 - 9 - Special Katie Comes Home Edition!

This week was marked by the exceptionally happy occasion of Katie coming home for a brief time! Better still, it was much less harried than her last trip home, but she still had to deal with a wicked time zone change and that devilish Daylight Savings Time invention which still confounds me. Anyway, her trip went something like this.

Wednesday, she flew into Orlando. Some wacky ticketing situation made it cheaper for her to fly in and out of different cities, so she flew into Orlando and flew out of Tampa. This was convenient because she got to spend some time with her friend Sandy. They went to one of Sandy's classes and got all pretty together before heading over to St. Pete on Thursday night. I finally got to see my girlfriend on Thursday night when she and Sandy met me and Frank (Sandy's boy) at The Dish at BayWalk. I always like going to The Dish, because I can try a whole bunch of different ingredients and figure out stuff that might be worth experimenting with at home. I do wish they'd let you pick you sauce first, before you load up on all the other stuff. I feel that the sauce you choose would greatly influence the ingredients you want to have cooked with it. I also wish there was a way to shed the social stigma accompanied with going back through the line a bunch of times. Even if you judiciously meter how much food you pick up on each pass, there's no way to not look like a pig when you parade up to the grill a half dozen times. But, dammit, it's my $15, and if I want to cruise by the trough all night, it should be my prerogative and no one should judge me! A funny thing happened while at The Dish, Katie learned of my elimination of soda altogether from my diet. Time was I would drink Sprite like a fiend, and being the good girlfriend that she is, she had a Sprite ordered and waiting for me when I got there. For those of you who have not noticed, or have not been around to notice, I no longer drink soda of any kind. This did not develop from some freakish desire of mine to be ubberhealthy, at least not entirely. Instead, it came from sheer economics: it is cheaper to buy a huge bottle of water at work than it is to buy many sodas of the same volume. Eventually it got to the point where I was drinking enough water that soda seemed too sweet for my tastes. When I asked the waitress for a water instead, Katie looked at me like I had ordered a shot of Tequila. It was funny.

Does anyone know the proper amount to leave as a tip at The Dish? I wrestle with this every time I go there. The waitress really does very little for me, even less than they do at Arigato. I'm not a cheap tipper, but I do have trouble forking over 15% for someone who did nothing more than bring me a drink and ask me if I know the difference between the ingredient bowl and the sauce bowl. If you have a solution to this quandary, please let me know. Anyway, after dinner we planned to see 'V For Vendetta' but that did not work out. After an overly difficult attempt to look up the movie times from a cell phone, we simply walked down to the box office to learn that the next showing was over an hour away. We all collectively decided that we didn't want to wait, so we all went home. The next morning I made Katie a delicious breakfast of eggs, grits and toast. After that we set out to see 'V For Vendetta' ourselves at whatever the Parkside theaters are called these days. Let me say this: if you have not seen that movie and you have the opportunity to, do it. It is such a good movie, and if it catches you the way it caught me, it will make you feel very bad about not rising up against something. After the movie it was a mad dash back to my house for a quick bite before meeting up with Sandy and Frank to head out to the main event for the weekend and Katie's original reason for coming home: the going away party for their mutual friend Richard.

Richard is in the Army and is one his way back to Iraq for another year-long stint. His party was at the home of his wife's parents on St. Pete beach and was highly populated by people I only knew in passing or not at all. This proved to not be a problem, as Katie, Frank, Sandy and I set up a defensive perimeter around the snack table and made our introductions and small talk when people came over to snag some munchies. The four of us put a serious hurtin' on the veggie tray, and I put away my share of the spanikopita that was circulating. The others were more hesitant, probably because its a hard word to say. Also, Richard's wife Stacey kept daring me to match her at eating peppers that were stuffed with cheese wrapped in ham. She thought this was a grand competition, but I will only reveal here that the peppers really weren't that hot, and I could have run circles around her. The party was fun, and we even got a few elusive souvenirs: photographs of Richard. Apparently he is camera shy, but we got a few, including one of him shaking hands with Frank where a combination of red-eye and freaky smile make Frank look more like Lucifer. At the end of the party the four of us left for a mad dash to BayWalk to Frank could take care of some business at work. After that we decided to trek up to Clearwater to eat at a Whataburger, a fast food joint that I was previously unaware of. Perhaps it was because I was already tired, but the trip seemed to take a number of hours. I know it was far less time than that, because if we really had been traveling for a few hours at the speed Sandy likes to drive, we would surely have been eating dinner somewhere in Kentucky. I enjoyed my Whataburger, but I can't say I would make the trip again on a whim. Good though it was, it wasn't quite as good as In-N-Out Burger.

The next day was going to be Katie's day with her family. We even managed to convince Jessie to drive up and hang out. That plan came to a halt when the grease jockeys that changed Jessie's oil forgot to replace the oil they drained out. Jessie learned this in the subtle form of her engine seizing up as she drove away. With Jessie being car-less, Katie and I decided to be heros and drive down to Ft. Myers and pick her up. We spent many hours in the car, but we got Jessie home safely at the expense of spending the evening the way we wanted to. The cake we planned to bake went un-baked, and there are still two Harry Potter movies I have yet to see. No matter, we can do that some other time. We got home at around midnight, and had to get up again at 4:30 to make it to the airport on time. That was the start of a very long day for both of us. Katie had to fly across three time zones and go to work for a few hours before she got sleep. I had to cross zero time zone but had to go to work for 12 hours before I got my shot at some Z's.

All in all, it was a very nice weekend, and certainly much less harried than her last trip home. It is undoubtedly my turn now to go out and see her in California, and I assure you that plans are already in the works. Some notes about Frank now. I have known Frank, or at least known about him, for many years through my connection to Gibbs high school, namely C. J. I will be honest and say that I didn't really like Frank, even though I mostly knew about him in the abstract through other people. That's all changed now, and I find him a most agreeable guy to hang out with. We have very compatible senses of humor, and it certainly helped that we bonded over "Napoleon Dynamite." Frank, you have earned my seal of approval.

Winners & Losers

Indeed, I am writing this post a good two weeks after the mentioned events took place. It was a stretch for me to remember the broad details that are chronicled above, and certainly no one reading this will blame me for not remembering minute details that made that weekend a little bit better or a little bit worse. There are no winners or losers. Well, I guess anyone who skipped over the whole post just to read about winners and losers, you can count yourself as a loser. I worked hard, although not in a timely fashion to write all that, and I don't appreciate you just blowing it off to get dessert first. On the other hand, anyone who read all the way through to get to this point, give yourselves a pat on the back, and bask for the next week in the knowledge that you are certainly winners, in my eyes!