Why Do The Heathen Rage?

I enjoy breakfast although I don't eat it often and rarely at home. Generally on a weekend it's more likely that I'd head for the local All Day Breakfast place in town.

This place I usually go has the old tyme booths with the mini jukeboxes and the bad Top 40 just a-begging for your quarters. The minis typically go hungry.

Although I've been called fussy in regard to food, I think my requirements are within acceptable limits at breakfast:

3 Eggs over hard (no runny jubbly bits for me thanks),
Regular bacon
Brown toast (sort of how I see myself, one big complex carb)
Coffee
=============
$5.50

See? Not too demanding or odd.

The waitress comes and takes my order and John's. Within 10 minutes, the food is ready and in front of us.

It's obvious very quickly that the bacon on my plate has been cooked beyond the limits of what even the pig would consider acceptable. I like crispy but draw the line at brittle. I pick up a piece and it crumbles, I touch another piece and it fairly turns to dust. For the record, John's bacon is not as well done.

I ask the waitress if it's possible to get some bacon that's a little 'less dead'. She smiles and says sure realizing on sight what the problem is. She goes to the little order window, calls in for a side order of medium done bacon and then comes over, leans in conspiratorially, puts down a side plate and says using my terminology, just put the 'dead bacon' on this plate, I'll eat it, give you the new bacon, won't charge you for it and nobody will know. Um, okay, sure.

I raise an eyebrow. John's confused, so am I. But not for long. While she's off serving someone else, big swarthy and cyclopsy cook lumbers into view carrying a saucer of limp barely cooked bacon in one of his mitts and grunts to the waitress. She points to me and he stands over me and fairly bellows: something wrong with that bacon? (the bacon that lies sadly fractured), I say well, yes, it's too crisp. He says nobody else would stand over that hot grille to make nice bacon like that for you! Nobody! No matter where you go!

I'm just looking quizzically back at him at this point and shrug my shoulders. He puts the new bacon which is indeed vastly underdone down, takes away the insulted bacon and makes his way back to the kitchen cave. There's a bacon Nazi? Nobody told me.

The waitress comes back a few minutes later with the bill, shows me that she's written in an extra side order of bacon at $3.00 and with something approaching a sloppy sleight of hand, puts $3.00 in coins down in front of me. She leans in yet again, she says he's very cranky and I'll tell him that you insisted on paying the $3.00. She takes the bill away with her.

Have I just entered the fucking breakfast Twilight Zone?

She comes back again -- hey all I want to do now is just eat and leave before I'm asked to dance any more of these steps I don't know. She says he'll probably come back over now and apologize. Yeah, I'd like that. I simply say it's okay, I'm over it. Get me outta here.

We wolfed down the rest of our brekkie, calculated what it was all worth, left a tip and scrambled out of there.

I can fry an egg and be surly. Maybe I'll start trying to fend for myself.

The Tao Of Kang

Kang is reflected in the eyes of Angela.

Angela has been given the potential gift of all knowledge that has come before her.

Kang is one part of this knowledge.

Angela will know that fullness can be emptiness, harmony cannot be without discord, chaos is borne of too much control and earth reflects heaven. Heaven does not exist without Kang.

Kung Pao Kang Tao Primer:

Kang is the name baby Angela has given to Tanya because she can't pronounce Tanya (or refuses to on principle).

Tanya likes poo.

Pooh has had his Tao done so why can't Kang?

Maybe I'm Amazed, Maybe Not

Whenever I've had occasion to visit other people's cottages, especially ones used by many different family members at different times, I've always enjoyed taking note of the different magazines and other reading materials scattered about.

You can usually count on a dog-eared Reader's Digest from 1974 (complete with a I Am Joe's Ingrown Toenail article) cozied up to an Architectural Digest which mightn't be quite big enough to cover the stack of National Enquirers. Then there are the books, any classic from Lawrence Sanders and John LeCarre to Sidney Sheldon and a well worn Harlequin or two.
I'm refusing here to acknowledge any sort of novelty bathroom reading. Damn.

On a recent visit to John's cottage, I came across something that at first frightened me. Fright turned to fascination and wonder and from there it was all fits and peals of laughter.

Here was a new sort of magazine previously unknown to me. Now, I've heard of scrapbookin' as an art (heh) but I'd not imagined that it was something that merited it's own magazine.

I'm still not sure it does.

Who knew there were so many ways to put a photo in an album and fancy it up? Not I.

Really, ideas on how to use scraps of coloured paper, stickers and other doodads to help adorn photos and keepsakes is about all I could make it out to be.

This must be the terrain? domain? insanity? of some very bored and possibly unhappy people. Careful that you don't spend so much time framing those little photos into manufactured memories that you forget to make real ones.

The simplest photo of you just standing there potentially could become so adorned at Mom's hand that it might just be forced to become fraught with meaning.

remember that time? you remember! we had just come from that thing and you said that funny thing about the other thing and then we went here and there and then something else happened and I bought this ribbon and you were standing there so I took the photo and arranged the ribbon under the corner of the photo in this album just so, remember that? that was a nice time wasn't it dear? remember? yeah, it was nice

It all reminds me of those people who go on vacation and camcorder every single thing never taking their viewer eye away from the machine for fear they'll miss something to bore everyone back home to death with. What about actually experiencing the moment? Don't let the photos / video become the memory.

Anyway...

The most gratifying section of the magazine was not the one that showed me what to do with those leftover paper doilies from my last tea party but rather the networking list of the many scrapbooking outlets throughout the U.S. of A., Canada and even extending into the U.K.

Try on the names of some of these scrapbooking stores for yourself.

I find it helps to announce the names aloud in your best pageant voice for the national televised audience.

Scrappity-Do-Dah!

Scrappin' USA Superstore

Scrapbook 'n' Such

Crop-Paper-Scissors

Scraptopia

Whim-So-Doodle

Scrap 2 It

Scrappin' Attack!

Scraptastic

and those were really just a very small sampling. Most have their own websites too so feel free to order lots of shiny things from them.

My cottage will only have serious magazines such as People and real literature like Harry Potter.

It's Funny Cause It's Sad

Didja ever...

... see the brilliant British series The Office?

...marvel at the creativity and wit of Ricky Gervais?

...wonder how he came up with all those zany characters?

...come to the realization that it's funny because it's true and you know this because you work in an office too?

...wonder which one you are?

I have and I'm frightened.

The Ouchfit

I may be a little obsessed with food since quitting smoking about 3 weeks ago.

I don't understand why nobody makes a hot fudge salad.

Most of the clothing pieces I throw together would be better referred to as ouchfits.

It is not helpful to eat a large bag of Smoky Bacon potato chips while reading William Leith's The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict.

Next week, I'm going to become obsessed with finding out whether the 6 pounds gained in 2 weeks can be as easily lost.

I think I know the answer already.