A bottle of white, a bottle of red. Perhaps a bottle of rose instead?

Why is it that when you go out with a large group of people for dinner, someone inevitably says, let’s just take the bill and divide it by X number of people we have? In theory, this is a reasonable idea; however, because I am the person who usually does not drink all the wine, or have the $9 appetizer, I wind up being screwed. It’s even worse when we go out for someone’s birthday because that person doesn’t pay, so there is one less to divide by. Over the weekend, twelve of us went out for a friend’s birthday and our share of the bill turned out to be $50 each. I had a $9.95 burger and $1.95 Dr. Pepper. Even including my share of the birthday boy’s meal and a couple of bucks for the cake we bought, how does that equate to $50? I had none of the seven $18 bottles of wine; I didn’t eat any of the five different $9.95 appetizers that were ordered. I was royally screwed and I didn’t even enjoy it. My burger was undercooked and greasier that it should’ve been. The fries were lukewarm. I don’t plan on going back to that restaurant either, but that’s for another day. One of these days I’m going to bring a notepad and a calculator, see who eats and drinks what and calculate the bill that way. We’ll see how they like it when the person who drank two bottles of wine, had an appetizer, the $17 entrée and the cup of coffee for dessert is stuck with the biggest tab while I wind up paying hardly anything. I don’t disagree with the theory, it’s just not a practical matter when you have people like me in your group and I’m beginning to take offense to having to pay more than my share when I can’t afford it.

They said screw you, I ain't got nothin' to lose

I am pretty sure I just got screwed a little. I say “a little” because it was only about .20¢ worth, but nonetheless, I was screwed.

I go to Subway about once every 10 days or so for lunch. Today was one of those days and I bought the same thing that I always buy. I got my usual combo and when the girl handed me my drink cup, I looked at it quizzically and asked if that was the right size. She said yes and confirmed it with the other employee, who I think is a manager-type of some sort. She then told me they were out of the larger cups. If you’re out of those sized cups, then why am I paying my regular price and receiving less in return? Like I said, it’s probably only .20¢, but I want what I paid for.

Also, there are some 300-plus Subway restaurants in Houston; there is another one within 2 miles of this one. Somebody please go borrow some cups!

We reserve the right to refuse service to you

I really need new lunch partner:

It took P 11 emails back and forth (for a total of 22!) to decide where to go to lunch.

The problem I guess was that I told him it was his choice.

The funny thing is that he likes to go to lunch early and I like to go late, but I conceded this time and said I would go at 12, but he took so long deciding that we’ll now be meeting at 1230, more to my liking!

On the road again...

An email I sent to family & friends around 11 am Thursday:

Hi everyone,

In case you haven’t seen the news, Hurricane Rita is bearing down on Houston and we are leaving town in about 1 hour. We are going to College Station, Texas, which is about 90 miles northwest of here and it is also where Texas A&M Univ. is. We have a place to stay with some friends up there. Personally, I don’t think this is far enough away, but I can’t convince anyone to go elsewhere. I filled up with 33$ in gas this morning, we have lots of supplies/water and enough alcohol to stay pretty buzzed for a few days! I think we took a case of rum and hurricane mix off the shelf. Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that we should be fine, the cat is coming with us and hopefully my apartment will stay dry. I will have my laptop with me and assuming we have power and a signal to the internet there, I should be able to check my email regularly. I’ll send an update as soon as I can.

We've all come to look for America...

All right, to the old lady at the Belgian restaurant tonight who probably didn’t speak any English, at least make some simple observations! You can see us all grabbing our wallets/purses to pay our check, so stop filling our water glasses! You’re wasting water, time and energy.

On the other hand, maybe you couldn’t hear our drunken friend R, screaming the F-word in almost every conversation he involved himself in, so you wanted to get a little closer to us in hopes of learning some real American-English. Nonetheless, I now feel compelled to drink some of the water as to not have it go to waste. Hundreds of thousands of people along the Gulf Coast desperately needed this lady a couple weeks ago to come around and continuously pour water, but here she is wasting it on us. Ok, ok, that was a little harsh, but you know you the thought ran quickly through your mind too!

In case you were wondering, Belgian food is not very different from anywhere else. With 12 of us at dinner, we had an array of different dishes ordered, but I could’ve eaten at most chain restaurants and had the same meals. My filet mignon was cooked accurately to medium, which is a rarity it seems these days, but was ultimately very bland tasting. The mashed potatoes were good, but I could’ve used more of them on my plate. What was that stuff on top of the tomato and lettuce thingy you put on the side of my plate? We saw a couple plates of Chicken Diablo, which looked to be nothing special; Salmon filet, which also looked to be sort of blasé, as in it wasn’t dressed up at all, just a piece of fish on a plate. The mussels in tomato sauce looked interesting, but why does it come with French fries? That seems like an odd combo.