Taco Sunday

 

I like Chinese and Mexican restaurants. Not just for the food, but because the food always comes out quickly. Mexican restaurants waste no time. You order and two minutes later a hot dish is plopped on the table in front of you. Delicious tacos and that bubbling brown lava called refried beans.

Yesterday Dennis and I decided to go out for dinner. Dennis suggested Mexican food, a nice place he wanted to try up in Andersonville. I looked at the menu on line and it seemed fine, so we went. We sat out on the patio where we sipped our margaritas and cervezas while watching the comings and goings of the crowd. It was very pleasant, for the first hour. That was when Dennis looked over at another table that had been seated forty five minutes after we had, and they were being served food. Okay, maybe the waiter figured we were talking and not in a rush. We had ordered food, so we checked with him. A look of puzzlement came over his face. He rushed off into the kitchen and then came back.

"I'm so sorry. There was a mix up in the kitchen. Now, you had the mole chicken." He said while looking at Dennis, "And you had...."

"No, that's not what we ordered." Dennis blurted out, "I had chicken fajitas."

"Oh, my. I'm so sorry." He then looked back at me.

"I had an al pastor, carnita, and fish tacos."

"I'll put that order right in." He said as he rushed off.

So Dennis and I sat there and talked, all the while I kept watching the kitchen door. In and out, plates of food being served to tables that had come in long after we had. We watched as tables turned over two and three times. Again we flagged down our waiter to find out what happened to our food. Again he assured us it was being prepared as we spoke. More time passed. It had been nearly two hours since we had been seated at the table, so I put on my best displeased face and went up to the kitchen.

"Where is our food? It's tacos for krissakes. Tacos take five minutes."

"I'm so sorry. Your food is almost ready. We're making it from scratch."

I looked at the man in disbelief.

"How else would you make it. It's tacos."

At that point we decided it was time to leave. As Dennis and I got up and started for the door, the waiter came rushing from the kitchen with our food. I would have kept on going, but we were hungry. So over two hours after we had sat down, we were finally served our food. Dennis seemed to like his fajitas. I found the flavor of the tacos I ordered to be a bit funky. Who knows. Maybe I had crossed that line. You know, the line where you irritate the help so much that they might spit in your food.

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker..... Oh Crap, What Did I Just Sit in?

 

Catastrophic Tornado Hits My Lilies

Sunday night I was wiped out. As a huge thunder storm that fueled numerous tornadoes swirled around my house, I slept. I do remember waking up to the bright flash and loud clap of thunder just once, but nothing else. Upstairs, Dennis was awake and watched as the trees bent to the ground and my lilies were destroyed. I slept. The reason I was so tired is that I had a rare weekend of activities. Not the usual hours of sitting on my ass watching television, but actual things to do. Like early on Saturday morning my next door neighbors took me out for breakfast. What a seriously nice thing for them to do. For my part, I fired up the old 1929 Ford and drove us all to the restaurant. Later in the day I hosted movie night with Gary and Doug. Or as Doug described it, "Two hours of watching a movie while you two chatty Cathy's talked over the plot lines." Not that there is much of a plot to Godzilla vs Kong. It's just a lot of noise and CGI laid over a formula monster movie. Sunday morning involved getting up the courage to go to a Chicago Cubs baseball game with my sister, Carolyn. I didn't feel like going, but I did want to spend time with Carolyn. So at noon I stood out on the corner of Peterson and Washtenaw and waited for the bus. Ten minutes later the bus dropped me off at the Red Line train station where a sign told me that they moved the station entrance one block back. Long story made a bit shorter, nine innings of baseball. Beer, vodka, peanuts. Walk over to the gay bars on Halsted after the game to the Kit Kat Lounge for food, and more beer and more vodka. Drag queen performer pissed off because Carolyn looked better and danced better. Tipped the bartender and the drag queen. Flagged down a taxi (cheaper than Uber) and said goodbye to Carolyn. I was fucking pooped. This old age crap is getting to me. Anyway, that's why I slept through Sunday night's big storm. 

 

Father's Day 2021

 

Thirty three years ago I came down with a bad case of cancer. It was one of those things you think only happen to somebody else. I was a thirty eight year old gay man and it was 1988. My immediate fear was AIDS. It wasn't. It was just run of the mill, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I was given a choice. Do twelve weeks of intense chemo therapy, or many months of lesser chemo treatments that wouldn't cause as many side effects. The first choice was considered more effective, so that's what I did. My hair fell out. Every single hair on my body fell out. Yes, every single hair, everywhere on my body. I gained weight from the prednisone I was taking. I looked like Uncle Fester from the Addam's Family. It was a horrible time in my life. 

Every Thursday I went to Presbyterian Saint Luke's hospital for chemo treatments. Those treatments made me weak and nauseous. My memory of the first chemo treatment is that I projectile vomited soon after. Somebody should have warned me not to eat. Anyway, as bad as all that sounds I was not alone. Every Thursday for twelve weeks, my Dad and Mom drove all the way up to the north side of Chicago from Tinley Park. They would pick me up and drive me to those chemo appointments. I hadn't lived in their house for nearly twenty years and felt very independent. That did not matter to them, I was their son. I was just one of their eleven children, yet every Thursday for twelve weeks I was number one.

Love you Mom. Miss you Dad.

Uncle Fester

 

Frustration

 

I had a frustrating day yesterday. It really only takes two things to make it that way. First was my old Ford. I spent two hours on it installing new brackets for the driver's seat so I would have two more inches of legroom. After some skinned knuckles and sore knees, I realized I was doing it all wrong. Unless I wanted to end up in the back seat one day, I would have to do it all over again the correct way. But, fine. I locked up the garage and went back into the house to regroup. Tomorrow is another day, and I'm sure I'll get it done then.

Move ahead to suppertime. I was making ribs in the Instapot, one of my favorite easy dinners. (Instapot is a fancy ass pressure cooker.) First you make up a little rub for the ribs, then add the liquids to the Instapot, hit the right button, and in less than an hour you have delicious ribs. Unless....

Let's look at packaging and how it affects certain of us who are not as agile as we once were. Like those goddamned blister packs for pills. I hate them. It takes me ten minutes just to open one pill, and requires knives, scissors, and sometimes a saw. For the ribs, I needed some water, apple cider, and liquid smoke (A flavor additive) to put in the Instapot. Water and cider, simple. But the liquid smoke bottle was brand new and secured by a skin of plastic wrapped around the top. After five minutes of picking at, digging at, and cutting at the plastic, I got the top opened. Under the top is another plastic seal with a little tab you pull. I picked at it and pried it, but couldn't open it. So I got the trusty knife, the same one I use for those blister packs, and stabbed the bastard. My reward was liquid smoke, brown liquid smoke, gushing from the bottle and dousing everything on the counter. It took me nearly thirty minutes to clean up, and required me to shout out the word 'Fuck!!' at least three hundred times as I wiped it all up. The only good thing is that I didn't have to worry about the stuff that landed on the floor. Scout took care of that.

Today's Tom Sawyer

 

One of my long time regrets is that I didn't take auto mechanics in high school. Even though I loved cars and couldn't wait to drive one, I passed on the opportunity to take that class. Instead I opted for the easy class, architectural drafting. It was clean and all you had to do was draw lines on paper. I did very well in that class.

With all the old cars I have owned in my life, that auto mechanics class would have been very helpful. Instead I have had to either pay somebody else to do the work on my cars, or sell them off when they got too complicated. Now I am again involved with an old car. A ninety two year old Ford, and I'm trying to do everything that needs to be done, myself. Over the weekend I changed a tire. I don't mean that I took the spare mounted on a wheel and exchanged it with one of the four other tires. I actually removed the tire from the rim and mounted a brand new tire with an inner tube on that rim. There was no cursing. There were no injuries. It was not that difficult. In fact it reminded me of doing the very same thing on my bicycle when I was a kid. I did learn another thing while I was replacing that tire. I learned that if I open the garage door while I work, numerous old guys would somehow appear and start asking me questions. Some of them were even helpful. Like seventy five year old Steve from a couple of doors down. I got him to crawl under the car and break loose the filler plug on the differential. I had been wrestling with that thing for a month and could not budge it.