Nutritional info may include extra dirt

I have to hurry up and post before I drink any more beer and I'm too drunk to type. It's been a long week and I'm looking forward to a weekend with friends. I'm foregoing a quilting class this evening to drink beer, eat pizza and play Guitar Hero with the guys. This is just fine by me and I wasn't feeling all that productive. I'm sure I can learn how to make a blanket sometime later when I'm more inspired.

Speaking of uninspired, we've been eating out a lot lately and I'm becoming increasingly grossed out by behavior I see from food service staff. The Panera Bread jockey dutifully wore his plastic gloves while preparing my bagels after wearing them while getting my change from the cash drawer. Within that same week the lady at Jason's Deli dropped a stack of disposable cups on the floor and put them back in the dispenser before I could come of the counter and stop her. I'm sure I won't get some horrible disease from either of these events, but it just means that if they don't think during those acts, they won't think when it really matters.

So in that situation, what would you have done? I didn't say anything but it annoyed me for days (obviously since I'm talking about it now). And because I didn't say anything I feel like I've contributed to the problem by not correcting them. Then again, it's like screaming at the dog for getting in the trash where it's more for your own benefit than the dog's.

So how do you handle strangers doing dumb ass things like that in a restaurant?

what runs in a family

My father sent me an email at 8:40pm saying his computer was "all messed up" and I was able to be there by 9pm to fix it. It also means, of course, that it's almost midnight and I'm just now getting home. The fix wasn't that time-consuming but all the chit-chatting around it was. When I was at my parents' Tuesday night I had passed a set of children's folding chairs and table on the trash. I immediately thought I should stop to pick them up but was in a hurry to get to my parents'. After spending an hour or two with them, I mentioned to my father that I had to get going soon to be sure to get this miniature dining set to save it from the landfill. It's not that I have any miniature people in my house that could use it other than the occasional visiting kid and we don't even really have a lot of space to store it, but I couldn't bear to think that something so perfectly useful would be thrown away and wasted. It just seemed selfish on the part of the world and it was my job to worry about these things.

I've been worrying about all the waste we've produced in our big office move. Sure, we haven't moved in over five years and we've amassed a bunch of junk to remove at one time. But I just don't know who to call about a woefully out-dated server with a bad power supply and everyone we did call had no idea how to help us. So it went to the landfill and I fretted about it.

When I left my parents' house very late that evening on "trash night" I drove slowly down our side street looking for the dining set but it had already been picked up. I took solace that there are extended members of our "family" that will save things from the landfill.

40 years ago today

On Halloween night in 1967, my parents got engaged. Daddy had just gotten his papers to send him to Vietnam after having been inducted that previous February. He called Mom from a pay phone on Fort Sill in Oklahoma to tell her. Mom: "Well, what do you want to do?"

Dad: "I think I want to get married."

They were married the Friday after Thanksgiving less than a month later. Whenever I worried that maybe Rich and I hadn't planned ahead far enough for our own wedding, I always reminded myself that Mom planned their wedding in under a month and even made her own dress. She's always worked well under pressure.

I called Mom yesterday on my way home from dinner and she sounded upset. The water heater had burst in their house for the third time since she's owned the house and it's directly over their dining room which serves as their office. It ruined her expensive speaker phone, may have ruined the computer and soaked tons of important papers - and we were lucky we found it only an hour or so after it happened.

She started to get choked up when she said she thought all her pictures of our wedding were ruined. Thankfully, her quick thinking saved most of them and the others are easy to re-print from digital images. It was odd timing that 40 years after their nuptials she was concerned about losing her photos of our wedding. Maybe I can convince them to get a family portrait of all of us this holiday season before time gets away from us.