As anyone who has read this site at all would expect, I went ahead and played some more of that silly DROD game, both yesterday and today. For similar reasons you would also know that whatever board was just “absolutely impossible” yesterday was easily overcome with a bit of thought. As well as a couple of other boards that I had been stuck on for a while. It is for that reason that I will not go into any detail of the particular board that has me stuck currently, since that will be a non issue by the time I post again, at least to follow the trend.
• The wife and I went out to dinner tonight, which is kind of unusual on a Friday night, but not unheard of. The place that we went to was “Yolanda’s Chuckwagon”. I would love to give you a link to a website, but the place doesn’t even accept credit/debit cards so it is probably unlikely that they have a website. The steak was excellent. If you ever happen to be somewhere between Phoenix and Tucson I would highly recommend stopping by for a taste of their Sirloin. Unfortunately there is just the one location, and it is a long way from damn near anywhere. Well worth the drive from where I live, maybe not worth the drive from upstate New York. I must say that it is the best steak that I have ever eaten in a restaurant though, far better than what passes for steak at the Outback Steakhouse.
The only problem that Yolanda’s has is the location. I think that they probably get a lot of traffic from the people who work at the prisons but live in Tucson, those people would have to pass the place twice a day on their commute, and it is the only thing resembling a steak for fifty miles in any direction. The fact that the Steak is extremely good and the portions are simply huge just makes anyone who eats there tell their friends. I would do the same, if I had any friends, instead I will tell you all about it, just in case you ever happen to be in the area. They do offer non-bovine meals as well, but only chicken as far as what I could tell. There were options on the menu for shrimp and lobster but they did not list a price and just simply said ‘varies by market, when available’. You could also just indulge in the salad bar, 6.25 gets you that in unlimited quantities and there are enough things to put on the salad that you certainly would not be disappointed. (unless, of course, you are that one asshole that wants fresh-steamed pumpkin on your salad, even though pumpkin is way out of season).
I sure do wish there were places to eat around here that had more than just one location as I am sure that it is pretty boring to read about a restaurant that you will never dine at. Of course lots of people read about Mc’Donald’s in the news and would never dine there either, so perhaps market saturation alone does not a restaurant make.
For some reason continuing on the restaurant thing, why I got no idea, I began to think about the place that we usually eat our mexican food. I have spoken about the place in at least a few posts, which I am not going to look up currently. L&B has extremely good mexican food, and I suppose it is not a real big surprise that the people who started the restaurant were hispanic. They were serving the chips and salsa prior to the meal long before someone figured out that if you did that you could have smaller entrees. L&B serves huge portions that are far better than any chain restaurant could ever do.
It was only when I started to think of the two local places that I realized why the Denny’s and JB’s of the world do so well. If you roll into a town you have never been to and see a Denny’s sign you kind of know what to expect, while when you see the sign for “Pete’s Good Eats” you don’t really know anything about it. While every town likely has a couple of eateries with wonderful reputations, most also have that one place that no one ever visits. How are you to know which is the one that has a golden reputation and which has recently reopened after bribing the local health officials to hide their insect problem? I guess that is why the Denny’s and the JB’s will spring up on every corner while the local place will get shut down; people would rather eat mediocre food than gamble about whether it will be great or garbage -I am not going to exclude myself from this group of people-.
That is why I find it such a wonder that McDonald’s is as big as it is. We know that the food is mediocre, at best. We know that the food is going to lead directly to obesity and heart conditions, yet we continue to eat it. Subway has started to expand rapidly in the last few years as well, but seriously, if you are eating a 12″ sub sandwich for lunch everyday, and then layering it with mayonaise, cheese, olive oil and the such, you would be better off with a big mac.
There is no way that anyone would mistake me for someone who lives an ‘active lifestyle’, but I was trying to get an estimate of how far I walk in an average day of work. I tried to face it like the way one would try to determine the word count on a thesis. I simply counted my steps during one-minute time-frames (randomly, you know, like when I remembered to do it again) over the course of a day. I averaged the number of steps based on the eleven one-minute examples, then multiplied that by the number of minutes I was at work. Then, assuming that each stride is about (I said 24 inches, since there are a lot of corners and the such that can not be compensated for otherwise) I calculated that I walk just a bit over eight miles while I am at work each day. That might not seem like much, but I also do not have the opportunity to sit down and the motion is pretty much constant. To someone who didn’t do what I do it would be a real cardio work-out. When you add to that the fact that I have to move around boxes of beef (average weight about 70 pounds) in the walk in every day, I think that I probably get more excercise than the majority of people in my age range. Now if I could just quit drinking all the beer I might be able to reverse the nine pounds that I have gained since the neck injury I had earlier this year…