Crabby Lady Popeye

On the way home from grocery shopping Saturday, Mark calls and asks me to pick up lunch.

"I want Popeye's chicken. They have some kind of chicken wing special."

"Ahhh... Popeye's?  The crabby lady's Popeye's?"

"Pleeease..."

I hate going to the crabby lady's Popeye's. It is the closest one to our house and not the worst, but still. I hate dealing with that woman. It is owned by the crabby lady who doesn't take coupons. Coupons that are issued directly from the Popeye's corporation. Also, she is a micro-manager. I have been there ordering, with everything going smoothly, when she sticks her nose between the cashier and me, screwing things up and getting the order wrong. Problem is that you can't say anything to her. She'll give you the stink eye and say something mean. My favorite visit was the time Mark left his wallet on the counter after he called her names. (Read about that one, here)

Anyway, I go to Popeye's and stand there in front of the counter looking for Mark's wing special on the menu. I start at one end and read across to the other end. I don't see any wing special, so I start at the beginning again. Now I see a wing special that I swear was not up there before, but before I can see what it is all about the menu changes. Popeye's has installed a new menu board. It is made up of four video screens and changes every minute or so because they can't fit all their options on one menu. If the idiots didn't use big photos of the food, and a such a large font, they could have fit it all up there. And about those photos, that is not at all what my order looks like when I pull it out of the bag at home.

"Whoa, did I just see a wing special flash off that screen?" I ask the young lady cashier.

"Which wing special did you want..." And before I can say anything the menu changes again.

"There, that one." I point up to the video screen which changes again just as the young woman turns to look.

"Does that thing have a damn pause button?"

Eventually I got my ten wings for five dollars, but it took much longer than it should have. One good thing about my visit to Popeye's. The crabby owner was not there, or there might have been trouble. Not for her, for me. She's mean.

An Accident Waiting to Happen

For years we've had a coffee table that sits in front of the sofa. We had it in Florida and then moved it on up to Chicago. I kind of liked it. It was big and had a drawer at each end for stowing things. Mark bought it from the now defunct Bombay Store and it served us well. Despite the gnawed leg courtesy of Scout, and a few other nicks and scratches, I liked it. But there were  a couple of problems. Like I said, it was big. It took up too much of the living room. Also, Mark considered it a nice place to store piles of his magazines. I keep hearing that the printed magazine business is in peril, but Mark is trying to keep it afloat all by himself. He must have twenty subscriptions and he never, ever throws them away. So there it is, a nice coffee table with about two hundred pounds of magazines on it and a table leg that has been whittled down a bit by dog teeth. All it took was for me to try and nudge it over a bit for that leg to snap and all of Mark's magazines slide on off to the floor. Nobody got upset. I simply put a small footstool under the corner of the table, all fixed. Mark looked at it as an opportunity to buy something. The new table came yesterday. I don't hate it, but it certainly isn't craftsman style, which is what most of our decor is in the living room. More like what they call mid-century. I'll just have to be careful not to get drunk and fall into the new table. It has a glass top and stabby things poking out from all angles. Perfect for a stumble bum like me. 

On Target

Monday, October 26, 2009

Too Good For Wal-Mart

I am in Target pushing around one of their new light weight shopping carts, and I am glad for that because I have had to cover ten times the distance I usually do when I shop here. Not only are these carts light weight, but they can hold almost twice as much crap as the old ones, and that has made Mark happy. The reason I have to cover so much extra ground on this shopping trip, is because overnight the nice people at Target have re-arranged the entire store. The result is that when I went to get Chandler a nice chewy toy, the dog and cat area wasn't there anymore. Instead of dog toys and kitty litter, there was a wall of televisions and video games. Despite getting directions to the pet department, I still ended up getting lost. You would think that Mark would be helping me with his innate ability to find his way around stores, but no, he disappeared within moments of entering the place, lured away by the adventure of exploring Target.After a long meandering hike, I finally found the pet department, and got Chandler something to chew on. You see Chandler has been a bad boy lately and has been chewing on things that aren't his. I figured if I got him a chew toy, he would stop chewing on the table legs, vacuum cleaner cord, and Mark. Unfortunately, because of the delay caused by getting lost in Target, Chandler had time to eat one of my shoe insoles. He didn't just chew it, he chewed, ate, and swallowed the thing, and I blame it all on Target. Maybe when he poops out pieces of the Doctor Scholl's gel insole later, I'll pick them up, and see if Target will let me return them.

5 comments:

Peggy

Is that a wire Chandler is chewing on????

Reply

Alan

The cord to the vacuum cleaner.

Reply

Peggy

Oh, mine looks like that when I run over it.....

Reply

Rich Pfeiffer

1975ish

One evening in February of 1973, I picked up an underground newspaper I had in the house and noticed a mention of the Chicago Gay Alliance. I decided that I would drive over there and see what that was all about. In a small brick house sandwiched between The Gold Coast and Cabrini-Green projects, on west Elm Street, I met a group of gay activists. That was where I met Richard Pfeiffer. Yesterday Rich's husband Tim, let me know that Rich died Saturday night.

Richard Pfeiffer spent fifty years working for LGBTQ rights. He had already been involved for a few years when I met him. Richard was one of the founders of Beckman House on north Halsted Street long before Halsted became synonymous with gay bars and stores. Beckman House was a gay community center with a youth group, a help line, and a speakers bureau that sent actual gay people to speak in front of school groups and other organizations. I accompanied Rich and another speaker on one of those speaking engagements. It was the early 1970s and out gay people were still rare outside of the gay ghetto. And no, I did not speak. More than two people in a room and I get the jitters. Perhaps Rich Pfeiffer's most amazing accomplishment was coordinating the annual Gay Pride Parade right on up to, and including, the 2019 parade and all the events around that. But mostly what I will remember about Rich and the rest of the guys from way back when, is the fun we had. Serious business fighting for your rights against the entrenched customs and culture, yet we had a lot of good times. Richard Pfeiffer's passing will leave a huge hole in our world. 

For more about Richard Pfeiffer check out these links.   http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/lgbt/From-a-March-to-a-Parade-Chicagos-Pride-History-/55589.html

http://chicagolgbthalloffame.org/pfeiffer-richard/

Pizza Controversy: New York or Chicago

New York Pizza

Problems with Mark's health has resulted in me being responsible for feeding us. There are a few things wrong with that. I hate to cook, I don't know how to cook, and I don't know what to cook. Yet, somehow I've come up with a few dinners, lunches, and breakfasts so that we haven't starved. Anyway, as I was pondering just what the hell I could produce for dinner last night, Mark said, "Why don't you order pizza for us tonight."  Great idea, and I readily agreed. My favorite pizza is what I grew up with. Old school Chicago pizza. Thin crust, cut into squares, with ingredients procured only from Mafia run suppliers. Yes, that was a thing back in the 1960s. Mafia mozzarella, tomato sauce, and sausage. They controlled the pizza business around here, along with the gay bars.

"How about Calo's Pizza?" I suggested.

"That square cut, weird Chicago pizza? No, I want New York pizza."

I controlled myself, and did not say, 'Then why don't you go back to New York?'

Instead of starting a huge argument, I suggested the little pizza place at Lincoln and Foster Avenues. The one with the sign that says, New York Pizza.

"Ugh, that isn't real New York pizza. New York pizza is all drippy with grease and you fold it in half and eat it like that."

"Oh right, I saw that in the Subway Pizza Rat video. Okay then, how about Lou Malnati's pizza?"

Mark's face twisted into a knot as he made a sound of disgust.

"Deep dish, I hate that crap. Here's my debit card, just get what you want, but not Lou Malnati's."

Forty five minutes later I was eating thin crust, square cut, Calo's Pizza. Unfortunately, with Mark's favorite pepperoni on it. No Mafia sausage.

Chicago Pizza

Not Tweaking

Two weird, totally unrelated things.

First. I live in Chicago, Chicago has rats. I don't have any in my house, but they're out there. So I keep a couple of rat traps on the enclosed back porch at all times. I caught a rat in a regular snap trap last week and threw the trap and the rat out. Then I replaced that trap with two sticky board traps. Large ones that said "For Rats" on the package. Yesterday the dogs were sniffing around the box I hid the traps behind, so I looked. One trap had been moved, and the other trap was gone. I started looking. Under shelves, behind boxes, under the porch. Everywhere, but no trap. I figure the rat got caught in such a way that it could still walk and escaped off the porch and into the yard. So somewhere in our neighborhood is a rat wearing a rat trap on its back. Creeps me out just a little bit.

Second weird thing. A dream I had this morning. In this dream the person who I am with (A regular character in my dreams, whose face I never see.) tells me that there is a new pinball and slot machine parlor next door. I go over there. It turns out that the pinball/slot machine parlor is actually just a room off to the side of a porn store. I ask the woman at the counter for quarters and hand her two dollars. She looks at me and says, "Is that all?" I tell her, yes. Then she asks me if I'm tweaking. I tell her, "Not in fifty years." So it turns out that it is only a front for a whore house, and I tell the lady who asked me if I was tweaking that porn is now free on the internet. I don't have sex with prostitutes, and her pinball machines are all broken.

Like I said, weird. I think it was the corned beef and Swiss cheese I ate just before going to bed.