Showing 38 posts from December 2008
Gardner, Kansas. Been there? About seven minutes southwest of Olathe on I-35? You'd never know it by just driving through, but this rapidly-growing burg in what I like to call "Real Kansas" (the flat parts) has some of the best places to chow down this side of paradise.
The two I'm thinking of are Chapala's and the Mandarin Chinese Buffet. Now, if you're familiar with the Olathe area, you know there's a Chapala's across from the Big Lots on Clairborne. It ain't too shabby either, and the decor is out-of-this-world ethnic. But the Chapala's in Gardner is the BOMB, even if the place does look like a dive compared to the Olathe location. Get the Nachos Fajitas and split them with a friend, unless you're hungry enough to ingest 5,000 calories on a single plate, because you will devour it. You will lick the plate clean like a dog, and everyone around you will say "Oh, he/she must have got the Nachos Fajitas" and smile. They must use at least seven kinds of cheese on that monster, so bring the lactate.
Mandarin Chinese Buffet has some of the most unique food you will find on a Chinese buffet. The usuals are there--beef and broccoli, sweet-and-sour chicken, fried rice--alongside taste treats I didn't think to write down. You'll just have to experience it for yourself. One I really liked had onions, green peppers, and what I think was pork covered with ground pepper. They also have fried and stuffed mushrooms, the latter of which are addictive.
Tomorrow my good wife and I start our new gym membership. It was worth it. :-)
Feel free to post your New Year's Eve or Day experiences, culinary or otherwise...
The two I'm thinking of are Chapala's and the Mandarin Chinese Buffet. Now, if you're familiar with the Olathe area, you know there's a Chapala's across from the Big Lots on Clairborne. It ain't too shabby either, and the decor is out-of-this-world ethnic. But the Chapala's in Gardner is the BOMB, even if the place does look like a dive compared to the Olathe location. Get the Nachos Fajitas and split them with a friend, unless you're hungry enough to ingest 5,000 calories on a single plate, because you will devour it. You will lick the plate clean like a dog, and everyone around you will say "Oh, he/she must have got the Nachos Fajitas" and smile. They must use at least seven kinds of cheese on that monster, so bring the lactate.
Mandarin Chinese Buffet has some of the most unique food you will find on a Chinese buffet. The usuals are there--beef and broccoli, sweet-and-sour chicken, fried rice--alongside taste treats I didn't think to write down. You'll just have to experience it for yourself. One I really liked had onions, green peppers, and what I think was pork covered with ground pepper. They also have fried and stuffed mushrooms, the latter of which are addictive.
Tomorrow my good wife and I start our new gym membership. It was worth it. :-)
Feel free to post your New Year's Eve or Day experiences, culinary or otherwise...
What else is there to tell? Not much, really:
* As mentioned in part seven, we had maybe 35 people show up for our wedding, most from our families and some friends from work. My wife's favorite uncle and aunt were there with bells on (the last time I ever saw her Uncle Max alive--a great, great guy). An old friend of mine came all the way from Michigan. A late uncle of mine, 75 at the time, drove down from Wyoming in a truck without air conditioning. Of the fifteen or so from my old radio career I invited, one showed up.
* My youngest niece was going to be flower girl but had a panic attack at the start of the wedding. She was four, so she was easily forgiven. I learned later she thought the priest (in his early 70's at the time) looked creepy.
* My stepson, all of six, was the ring bearer. He made it maybe two feet down the aisle with a stately bearing, then saw his best friend from daycare and immediately ran over to say hi and talk about less boring stuff than a wedding in progress. His friends' parents gently nudged him back in the proper direction. Later in the wedding, when my bride and I were kneeling before the altar as the priest gave his homily, he thought that looked cool and decided to join us. He got right in the middle.
* My stepdaughter was Maid of Honor. Her dress, which my wife had a friend make, was more expensive than the bride's. She was 11 pushing 12 and the same height as her mother, and had been getting her figure for the past year. Everyone wondered who the young woman was. No one could believe she was only 11. Until they talked to her for a few minutes, that is. ;-)
* In January of 1998, because new ownership of the stations where I worked wanted staff reduced significantly before they took over, I lost my overnight disc jockey job at what was then the local "smooth jazz" station. This proved to be the end of my radio career as I could find no other station in Kansas City interested in hiring me, and leaving for better opportunities in another place was just out of the question. No way was I going to put the woman I was engaged to and her children through that! So, I went back full-time on my manufacturing job (I'd kept it even when radio started looking more promising, but for only 25 hours a week) and looked for other opportunities. I found one as a "product information specialist" for the same company. My start date in that new capacity: August 11, 1998. We'd also found a house we liked in beautiful Olathe, Kansas. With my father-in-law's help, we could actually afford it. Closing date: August 11, 1998. Yes--in three days, I got married, started a new job, and closed on a house. I grew up fast!
* We spent the first 75 days of our marriage fixing up our new house. The original owners apparently weren't happy with how much we paid, so they decided to leave us some wacky presents: No less than thirty 30-gallon-sized full bags of trash in the garage and broken beer bottles, crushed cans, destroyed toys, a destroyed propane grill, and a destroyed trailer (just the bed, no axle, no wheels) in the back yard. There had been a storage shed back there. When looking at the house, I'd asked the owners if they'd leave it. They said sure. It was gone. There was also a swing set. We asked if they'd leave it too. They said sure. It was in a neighbor's back yard when we moved in. Inside the house, all the bedroom doors had large holes in them, and every single electric outlet was held in by one screw instead of the two one usually finds in electric outlets. In fact, we found lots of things missing screws. And everyone, I mean everyone, we had to call to fix anything we couldn't fix ourselves, told us a) they could tell someone had tried to fix it by themselves and b)--their exact words every time--"they did a half-assed job of it." So we came to call our happy abode The Half-Assed House. We live in it to this day. We will never move. Too much of our blood, tears, toil and sweat are in it, not to mention our money.
And that's a good stopping point. You already know about DiDi--she came along a little over a year after we moved in, just when I'd finally reclaimed the yard from all the exotic varieties of weeds Kansas could throw at it. The stepdaughter is now 21 pushing 22, the stepson 16. You don't need to know our ages.
Unless my muse inspires me over the next 72 hours, this may be the last entry for a little while. Memory lane gets a bit weary to travel.
I'm home with my good wife, who went through a "bunionectomy" this morning. That's the official medical term for it, "bunionectomy." Makes it easier to stomach than "cartilage so torn up it looked like your wife's foot had a bullet hole in it," I guess.
She's doing okay. She's sitting with her foot propped up and iced watching All My Children after a good lunch. I would rather have a rhino gore my privates than watch that show, so you get this update. More to come depending on how "soapy" she gets.
Normally I don't comment on partisan politics of any nature, but this blog's latest post is too good not to share with you: "A Great Moment in American History" at http://stmosesblack.blogspot.com. The author comes well recommended by a friend who attends his church. While he writes with a traditional Catholic perspective, anyone who understands what it means to stand for life will surely appreciate what he says regardless of personal creed. His is now the top entry on my bloglist on the right. Read it. It's worth every moment of your time.
My good friend I've never met in person, the Big Doofus from Big Doofus Blog (linked on the right on this page, scroll down to find it), sent me a boatload of links to other blogs with the sage advice, "If you want traffic, give traffic." (Actually he said something strange about potato salad, but that would make no sense.)
So I've been scoping other blogs lately, occasionally leaving comments. And it made me wonder: Are we what we blog?
In other words: Is what we write on our blogs, really ourselves, or what we imagine ourselves to be? Are we laying our souls bare before a voyeuristic universe? Or are we airbrushing them into something impossibly soft and pure? If someone met us face to face, would we look like what we blog? Or would we shock, disappoint and horrify?
I worked in radio for several years. I have what they call in the trade a "big-boy voice." It's a nice smooth baritone that just screams "radio." And because of it, I can no longer work in that profession, because I do not sound "real." "Radio voices" are no longer wanted. "Natural" voices are. But my natural voice IS a radio voice. I kind of resent being told how I naturally sound isn't "real."
Likewise I like to think I am what I blog, but it's easy to wonder if things get embellished, even unintentionally. I know a great many people that, taken solely at their word, must be utterly exceptional human beings. They never say anything thoughtless, they always do the right thing, never misunderstanding or misunderstood. They present themselves in the best possible light. Human nature, I'm told. Yet... not real. Not human. We're not always eloquent. We're not always angelic. We screw up, all the time! Why not just admit it and show we've learned from it? Why is that so hard?
Hmmmmmmmmm?
