Texas Treats

One of our sons was in San Antonio last week. He sent a picture from The Alamo. I, trying to be clever, suggested he get some pie with ice cream, or Alamo'd (get it?) while he was there. Well, it turns out that apparently lots of others think that way and there are restaurants with pie Alamo'd all around The Alamo. In fact, they’ve got it, well, surrounded. I had no idea. I will add this to my list of foods to get when I get to Texas along with:

•          Texas Toast
•          Old El Paso taco shells
•          Texas Sheet Cake
•          Austin Crackers

I’ve got a Texas sized appetite.

THAY

Do you ever see someone and have the following exchange:

You – Hey! How are you Brent?

Brent – Pretty good. You?

You - Pretty good. How are you?

Well, that’s awkward, isn’t it? I call this the Triple How Are You, or THAY. I did it yesterday with somebody. So, what do you do in this situation?  Your options include:

1.       Apologize immediately for the THAY. Meh. This gives the other person the upper hand.

2.       Don’t say anything and see if they ask you a second time how you are. That would be a Quad How Are You (QHAY). Unfortunately these rarely happen.

3.       Say something like, “Sorry, I’m still groggy from that royal wedding. Wasn’t Megan’s dress beautiful? The fact that she was American should have caused them to move the start of the wedding to a time more convenient for us Americans.”

I’m going with #3. You can use that wedding line for a few months and then you’ll have to find some other excuse.

Prisoner Lunch

Have you ever been in a restaurant when they bring the prisoners in for lunch? I was in this diner in a small town with one of my co-workers when all these guys with orange vests came in. They weren’t hunters. They were some type of prison road crew. Apparently they got to eat lunch out. Not sure why they couldn’t brown bag it, but it was what it was. So they came in – a dozen, maybe 15 of ‘em. They were well behaved and all. But it got me to thinking – if these guys are eating the same food in the same restaurant I am, and if they’re playing the same jukebox I’m playing, remind me again please of the advantages of NOT being in prison. Oh yeah, there’s one more thing. I had to pay for MY lunch.

No, Jailhouse Rock was not on the jukebox. And no, Bill Cosby was not on the road crew.

Sports!

So, yeah, I read today where Tom Brady attempted to call Ichiro Suzuki regarding some stretching techniques that Ichiro does. I think that’s kind of cool. Two athletes from different sports giving advice to each other. There was one little problem, according to the article: Ichiro does not know who Tom Brady is. Really? Is it really possible to live in the United States and not know who Tom Brady is?

In a separate story, Tom Brady was seen wearing this tux on the red carpet at the Met Museum Costume Institute Benefit Gala.

 

The obvious connection here? Ichiro didn’t want to have anything to do with a guy who would wear that tux."Tell him I don't know who he is."

Do you not own a mirror, Tom?

Guess

Remember those “Guess Your Weight” and “Guess Your Age” booths at the amusement parks? Do those guys still exist? Did those guys ever get married? Or did their dates say stuff to them like, “Quit staring at me. You’re guessing my weight, aren’t you?”

I want to start up a “Guess your credit score” booth at one of these carnivals. Sounds like fun, for me at least.  Maybe not so much for the customer. Are any of these booths fun for the customer? I mean, what’s worse? Being told you look older than you are, being told you look heavier than you are, or being reminded that you have bad credit after you just paid $50 to get into an amusement park?  

The “guess your weight” guys could probably get jobs at the post office in the off season. “Hey. The scale’s broken again. Get that "guess your weight" guy up here so we can process these packages!”                                                        

Sick Poet

I talked to an old friend the other day, and, I’m not sure how we got onto this topic, but we had a nice discussion about writing sick day excuse notes for our kids. I’m thinking that I never wrote one. My wife must have written them. Shame on me for not knowing. But my friend remembers writing the excuse notes for his kids. In fact, he told me that he occasionally wrote the notes as poems describing his kids’ illnesses. (You can’t make this stuff up.) I didn’t ask him if he brought up the topic at parent teacher conferences. “So, like, what do you think of my poetry?” 

I wonder if any famous writers or poets got discovered this way. Did Keats have sick children? Sandburg? Whitman? Maybe I should have written those notes back in the 90’s…