Go go go to this website!
It is for Daily Constitutional . . . a nice little magazine (that is growing all of the time) . . . that is made by some of my nice little friends (a squirrel, a turtle-dove and a bevy of cheep-monks).
Seriously – if you get a chance – go and see what there is to see – which is almost all of it. Let me know what you think . . . we were going for a very very spare spare look (look).
And – I will admit right here and right now – that a tiny bird told me what to put on the left hand side . . . it looks true true good.
I (kind of) forgot to say that I made the site . . . oop.
A Review of Ressie Mae’s Soul Food:
I read on this site that I should go and try out a little soul food spot right around the corner from where I work. It should be known that since leaving the comfort food haven of the South – I am always anxiously looking for any way to fill the empty hole in my stomach – my arteries – that this type of food usually allows for. So I jumped at the opportunity. Literally – I hop, skipped and jumped the entire way around the corner, straight through the front door and to the counter to get a heaping helping of food that would make my night. That would make-my-night-worth-eating.
I ended up ordering the candied yams or maybe they were sweet potatoes (they were orange), the macaroni and cheese and the green beans with bits of ham. On my way out, I was so impressed by how much the food weighed – that I got bleary eyed with excitement and was cajoled into buying a cup of $2.00 sweet tea. I must repeat that I am a sucker for soul food.
Before I tell you about the food – I want to point out that the reason I didn’t get the fried chicken was because there is a lot of typing to do at the job – and I didn’t want to gum the computer’s works up . . . I can now definitively look back at that decision as possibly being the point where everything went absolutely wrong.
The mac-n-cheese was a tasteless greasy plop of tightly bound pasta with a layer of orange wax resting on top. One of the sure fire ways to make crummy mac-n-cheese is to try to pack too much pasta in. No flavor can move around – no cheese can penetrate – nothing good can happen. A couple of other ways are evidently to forget to use anything approaching any kind of seasoning and the use of army grade cheese stuff. Sometimes, if just one of the cardinal mac-n-cheese mistakes are made – goodness overcomes, and the outcome is, at least, edible . . . unfortunately, for this meal, that just wasn’t the case.
After that mac-n-cheese rant, all that I will say about the yams (we’ll call them for now) and green beans is that they weren’t so good. The yams were the most edible part of the meal – so they get a pass. The beans, on the other hand . . . I’m not sure how to even go on except to simply ask this question. How can anything be cooked with chunks of ham and still come out so lifeless and tasteless?! I once cooked up a pair of socks with a bit of ham hock – and I don’t mind telling you one bit . . . they were delectable.
So the meal was the meal . . . and I ate what I could. But the real burr in my side came from the evil (and I don’t use that word lightly) concoction that they called sweet tea. Here is a quick sweet tea recipe – boil some water, add some tea bags, add some sugar and then (after letting it cool down) enjoy the best tooth rotting (and I say that in the best way) drink you will ever have. So easy. So simple. So not what they did. It tasted like some sort of mix – maybe from a syrup – maybe from a powder – but all from hell. I had two sips and threw it away. Later I had to console my trashcan when I found it retching in a bathroom stall – I will never forget the sad look on that trashcans face. It (and that tea) haunts me to this day.
I ate at Ressie Mae’s. I gave it a shot. I have decided that maybe they should get a nifty new slogan – something like “Come to Ressie Mae’s where we’ll take your money, give you crummy food stuff and hurt your soul – just a smidge!†or something similar to that. I take it back. That slogan is obviously really long and not entirely fair . . . maybe just “Ressie Mae’s. We’ll hurt your soul!â€
They certainly hurt mine.
Maybe next time – I’ll try the chicken.
Today is a travel day. So for the next 870 miles or so – keep those fingers crossed . . . because it is a long long road that the dog and I have ahead of ourselves.
We thank you for your crossed fingers.
A ROUGH WEEK!
Here is an illustration of how a week that starts to go downhill can quickly pick up speed as it rolls rolls rolls down down down – to the point where you have to address the situation(s) that is(are) happening as being oddly humorous – if even just because you can’t really believe that the world is serious about what is going on. . .
This specific series of events started when I burst out of my house fretting about being on the cusp of “about to be†being (and being and being) late to a meeting that had taken me months to arrange. Immediately I was stuck by the distinct brokenness of the windshield of my car – which was a state that it hadn’t been in when I had gone to sleep the night before.
I yelped a little curse and sped towards getting severely lost for my meeting somewhere in the wilds near the Alabama border – when I go the bright idea to call up my lizard endorsed insurance company to ask what I should do about the ever (ever) growing crack on the big piece of glass in front of me. Their first suggestion was to pay the $500 (five-hundred dollar) deductible – which didn’t sound very fun to me. The next was to contact the glass company directly and see what they said.
Well – I got in touch with the glass company – where I got stuck knee deep in an odd conversation about poetry and the cosmic nature of cosmic things that are cosmological in nature. All the while, I was getting more and more crazy twisted lost and later and later to my meeting. It was a strange time to be driving around – but I scheduled the windshield to get repaired the next day – in my driveway – for only $200 (two-hundred dollar bills) and all seemed better in the world. I even (eventually) got to my meeting.
The next day rolled around and the nice guy came and fixed my windshield (in my driveway) – it was great – the world was great. The world continued it’s upswing when I found a super cheap new XM Satellite Radio for the car. I tend to drive as much as a trucker up and down the east coast (or the E.C. as we call it in the driving trade – because abbreviations are quicker to say) – and the XM has become my favorite crutch to lean on as I drive. So I bought the new unit and properly installed all of the wires running along the (new) windshield and the antenna coming out of the trunk and everything. Things were really on the up and up and up and up – I’d say.
We are officially at the middle (the high point) of the movie (the bad movie) where everything starts to zip downward style.
Now (and we are still in day number two here – the same day that the windshield was installed and the XM was bought/installed) I had another meeting in the afternoon. So I got into my awesome car and went went went to it. But not – of course – before I had to go to the tire place around the corner to get the sadly flattened tire happily unflattened. On the way home was where the next batch fun happened (it was becoming an all I could eat buffet of fun). It started raining – the kind of crazy rain where you can barely drive – and so I did what you are kind of supposed to do . . . I turned on the wipers. Nothing happened. On the highway – in the pouring rain – into the “emergency lane†I went. Out of the car – fiddle-faddle with the wiper – and then POP! The windshield cracked again . . . the wipers were too tight – or the glass was too lame – or something.
Luckily – the company came out the next day to repair the (put in a new) windshield. Everything seemed to be looking up . . . Until I got into the car later – to find that the newly installed antennae wire had been cut during the windshield re-installation process . . . the windshield and the tire were doing well . . . the XM was dead . . . my head started hurting.
I took the XM back (sneakily putting my old – also broken – but not in any detectable way – antennae into the box) – to get a different one. Evidently – I got the last one. There were no replacements.
It had been three days of 2 (two) broken windshields, a flat tire and a bought/installed/broken/returned radio thingy. It all made me sleepy, so I went home and took a nap. That usually makes the world a slightly better place.
Slightly . . .