The Bad Waitress - Farewell

Farewell to the The Bad Waitress.  Today is their last day.  I have fond memories of eating there with Aeryn as they were growing up, after acting classes at MIA, after the Tea Tastings over at Mrs. Kelly's, and just generally if we were in the hood.  It was probably our second go-to in that area after Christo's [and we have reasons for eating at Christo's beyond "we like Greek food" including the owner being an acquaintance, her niece being a school acquaintance of both my brother and myself, and my workplace of what seems like forever ago having been only a few steps closer to Lake].  Extra props for The Bad Waitress because I didn't catch covid there. Instead I caught it basically next door at the Copper Hen on Easter for a buffet brunch.  The very thing they tell you not to do.  We went to Bad Waitress only a month before that, back in March 2022, and they were incredibly careful about keeping a lot of ventilation going, masked up, and particularly clean.  I definitely felt safer there than in a number of venues. I'm really going to miss my occasional breakfast there, particularly when they got creative with the pancakes.  A sad departure.

"When we opened The Bad Waitress, we set out to serve our friends and neighbors better food with a fresh approach. We’ve believed since the start that brunch makes everything better — but this time, it couldn’t save the day.   With great sadness, we announce that The Bad Waitress will close indefinitely after brunch on Sunday, January 29, 2023. Being a part of Eat Street and serving the Whittier neighborhood and beyond these past 18 years has been an honor. The strength, spirit, resilience and support of this community will continue to inspire us for years to come, and we are so grateful to have had the opportunity to serve you. We could not have done it without all of you.  We hope you’ll all join us for one last lunch date, boozy brunch, mid-morning coffee, or to use your Bad Waitress gift card before we close our doors on Sunday, January 29. "

Breakfast - Elsie's

Eryn and I rolled up to North Minneapolis to have breakfast with Kyle at Elsie's this morning.  It was a balmy -13F when we left if the details were correct.  Certainly felt that cold.  Eryn likes their breakfast steak, so I eat her left over eggs and hashbrowns with a pancake.  I think the pancake was overkill.  I realized we should have brought her bowling ball and shoes.  Then I realized 8:00 a.m. is too early for bowling.

For Ingress purposes, the trip home is amusing as I roll through the Riverview area and she tap hacks 30 or 40 L8 portals. Good way to top off.

Kodu

I spent this morning at Pacer in Bloomington teaching girls how to "code" in Kodu.  It's not exactly coding; more assigning action to objects w/in the framework.  But it gets the idea across and, if you get complicated, aspects of it are pre-Unity.  The girls were great.  They all seemed to be having a great time.  We did a few other activities as well including drawing favorite video game characters and yoga.  Yes.  Yoga.  There's now a picture of me in a yoga pose (Warrior II) with the rest of my coworkers who volunteered.

Two of the girls were excited I knew about Five Nights at Freddy's and Foxy and Bonnie.  One of them drew Foxy as her character and let me take a picture.

Afterwards I went to Poor Richard's Commonhouse for breakfast/lunch.  It was not an optimal breakfast.  No choice of toast type.  Hashbrowns were patties.  Eggs over medium were a little too cooked.  Bacon was good.  I threw a Summit oatmeal stout on top of it and made it a "Guinness" breakfast.  That fixed it.  It was interesting because there were a lot of people there running some sort of Valentine's Day sexy clothing marketplace.  A woman in a red lame' dress - short - was sporting red wings  like an evil angel (fallen angel?) and wandering between the back room and front area encouraging sales.  She had to have  been at least...at least...20 years younger than the average customer.

Later the whole family went to the Uptown to see the Oscar Nominated Short Films 2018 (animated).  Garden Party with the frogs was morbid, but great.  And obviously an attempt to show off computer animation.  Amazing.  I loved Revolting Rhymes, a Roald Dahl story, about Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf trying to get vengeance.  We agreed that Lou, about a living Lost and Found, will probably win as a Pixar entry.  Damn cute and to the point.

And then...to make it a full day, we topped it off with the copy of Heavy Metal that arrived via Amazon.  Eryn said it was not what she expected, but she enjoyed it.  And she really enjoyed the music.  That's really all you can get/expect out of Heavy Metal if you're not in an altered state.

Flowers

Monday was Macy's Flower Show Day.  My wife didn't have any clients, so we grabbed her as well and went to see if the flower show was worth the fuss.  It was not.  I find the arboretum and Como both significantly more interesting.  All the flowers looked a little wilty.  I suspect coming into the show after it's been on for a week you get to enjoy flowers that are suffering the effects of hundreds, if not thousands, of people touching them.  I certainly saw lots of touching and bumping.  It's a bit of an older lady pile up there, with a number of older men in tow.  The women need their pictures with all of the flowers.  It's peculiar.  But perhaps that's what happens when department stores all close their photo studios (I was in Sears today explaining to Eryn where the photo studio used to be and how I got plenty of photo studio pictures when I was a kid).

We kicked off the afternoon at The Hen House downtown.  A very good breakfast.


And an amusing way of differentiating the women's restroom from...


...the men's restroom.


Here we are at Macy's and the statue of David, who changed floral patterns every few seconds.  As you can tell, Eryn isn't exactly keen to be there.  In the grand scheme of laser tag, amusement parks, state park trips, and board game excursions, I think this ranked lowest on her list.  If only the Betsy Tacey museum had opened three days earlier, I could have made her think back fondly on the flower show as more interesting.


I liked the Starry Night flower exhibit, although it was screaming, SCREAMING, for a Tardis, either in the painting or installed alongside.


I feel this is part of our daily excursion because it's in the parking ramp.  What are they trying to do to bicyclists?  It looks like a glorified mouse trap.  Hey, follow these signs to this dimly lit, locked cage full of dirt and various other things.  Put your bike in there...go on...it's safe.  At least if you're under 7'0".

Tater Tot Breakfast Redux

I've been making tater tot, cheese, and ham in a crock pot for company potlucks for six years now.  It's definitely not a cheap meal to make - almost 5 pounds of tots, almost 2 pounds of cheese, about a dozen eggs...I follow that recipe loosely - but it seems to be appreciated.  It took approximately 30 minutes for it to disappear during the morning portion of today's potluck.  I got to haul my crockpot out of there almost immediately.  As a nice side effect, it kept the car very warm this morning on the ride into work.

I realized that I didn't post pictures with the recipe before.  So here they are.  All the cheese, tots, ham, pepper, and onion ready to go except for...


...eggs.  Lots of eggs.  I mixed a bit of milk in as well.  I didn't use the 12th egg - if you're counting - as it had a crack in it.  I don't think anyone noticed.


After a night of cooking on low.  You can't see it, but it's bubbling.  Maybe next time I should take a video.  The edges were particularly crispy and tasty.


And the full pot, so you have some idea of what disappeared so fast.  Total calories in that pot?

• Eggs: 11x78 = 858
• 4 pounds tater tots = 26 x 4/5 x 160 = 3328
• 24 ounces of ham = 75 x 24 = 1800
• 1.5 pounds of cheddar = 113 x 24 = 2712
• 1 green pepper = 24
• 1 onion  = 44
• 1 cup skim milk = 83 

Total: 8849 calories

Sunday Breakfast

Yesterday I biked into downtown St. Paul to have breakfast with Ming at the Four Inns.  I had to wait around in front of the federal building for a while because it only took an hour to get there, not the hour and a half I'd allotted myself, so I amused myself by taking photos and reading the news.  This one turned out really well.

When Ming got there he was on the other side of the building and, by the time I caught up with him, he was talking to the cops on the phone about the guy who'd been on the side of the trail with a machete.  Unfortunately, the cop couldn't investigate because he didn't know how to look up bicycling trails on Google.  So there's your piece of advice for the day.  If you're going to commit a crime, commit it on a bike trail and you'll buy yourself hours while the cops try to align it with geography they understand.



This was in the window across the street.  Vote Betty!  The nurses used to have lots of this exact sign when I worked for them back in the 80s and Betty was running for City Council.  I believe she actually came to the office once to talk to the nurses as the association (our district wasn't officially a union) did a lot of political action committee work representing registered nurses and health care in general.


The Four Inns had good food.  The pancakes were particularly tasty.  This guy loomed over us throughout breakfast.


And she stared at us from the corner.  She reminds me of art I'd see at work.


After breakfast, we noticed a bag under a bench right up against the building.  So we tried to find a security guard who could help us, but when we got on the elevator and pushed the button to the 10th floor, it just turned itself off again.  There was no one immediately available on a Sunday morning.  After taking a closer look I could just see inside to see it was empty, so I popped the top open so it was obvious nothing was inside for anyone else who might be worried about a bomb scare.  Given the current nonsense about physically implanting bombs in people, I wonder how they'd have reacted to me calling in the authorities to look at a lunch box with a big chunks of metal in my hip and a scar.  Guess it depends on whether they brought a metal sniffing dog as it doesn't show below the edge of my bike shorts.

Lilydale has had a lot of work done since I last pedaled into St. Paul.  They're routing the trail along the wetlands a little further south, and this is going up.  Very nice looking as long as you don't peek around the corner and see what seems to be a homeless tent city hidden in the woods.

I raced a couple of road bikers here just to make them work.  They never like getting passed by my hybrid/sport bike.  It's a good reason not to accept Ming's mirror - I'd only use it to mess with people.


The panoramic view.  You can see it better at the [Original].
 

Postpourri - Agile, Bananas, Breakfast, Beer, Memes

Been a while since I did a postpourri, but I had a few things queued up that I found enjoyable:

1.) How to open a banana at viral video. Perhaps Mean Mr. Mustard can benefit from knowing how to open those bananas he stores in his banana bunkers.

2.) Know Your Meme - in case there's an internet meme you don't understand or missed. You can't be expected to function in polite company if you don't know about Om Nom Nom Nom or the Keyboard Cat.

3.) Conner posts a link to the beer flow chart which advises you what to drink (hmm...this link might work better).

4.) Metro magazine reviews breakfast. I ordered a subscription to their magazine after reading their breakfast articles. They review the bacon independently. That's good journalism.

5.) How to turn your chest freezer into a chest fridge (why? because it saves you a lot of money when the cold stays in the fridge, and you can stop yelling at your kids, "QUIT STANDING AROUND WITH THE DOOR OPEN!")

6.) Boing Boing has a quote on their site from 8 years ago quoting Joel on Software talking about the MBA mind that I found highly amusing if you work with Agile at all:

"People who aren't programmers are just looking at the screen and seeing some pixels. And if the pixels look like they make up a program which does something, they think "oh, gosh, how much harder could it be to make it actually work?"

The big risk here is that if you mock up the UI first, presumably so you can get some conversations going with the customer, then everybody's going to think you're almost done. And then when you spend the next year working "under the covers," so to speak, nobody will really see what you're doing and they'll think it's nothing.

McGross

This morning, running late to work, I realized I was particularly hungry. I stopped at McDonald's with the intention to get an Egg McMuffin, which I haven't had for a long time. I ordered and picked up my food without looking at it as the cashier's warning that the hashbrown was wicked hot was enough to convince me I had the right meal. I ate the hashbrown first because I like them scalding, like some sort of giant tater tot cooked at 500 degrees. If you leave them around for even a moment, they start to taste more like grease and less like a tater tot as far as I'm concerned. Which, not so coincidentally, is how I feel about tater tots themselves. Leave 'em sitting around and they taste less like crispy potato goodness, and more like cold grease. That applies double for tater tots with a hot cheese injection juicy lucy style.

After the hashbrown, I reached in for my McMuffin and, instead, found myself eye to eye with a McGriddle. It smelled strangely sweet and sort of like cheap maple syrup and was obviously pretty much a McMuffin, but with strange pancakes bracketing it instead of a muffin. I tried to remember if I'd just given them the wrong meal number, or if I was the victim of an attempt to unload some of the backlog. I had my doubts, but I took a bite. It was like eating maple candied breakfast. UGH! Revolting. In a moment that might be familiar to some of you, but was new to me, I was forced to consider whether it was better to spit or swallow. Get your minds out of the gutter. I was talking about when Kyle had uni.

I don't mind my food touching, and I've been known to let my breakfast eats indulge in a bit of of orgiastic mixing, but I generally keep my eggs and sausage separate from my pancakes and syrup. Apparently, Malcolm Gladwell's "thin slicing" was at work, and I had innately realized that syrup doesn't belong near the rest of your breakfast food. I drank my entire large orange juice, and still couldn't get the candied maple taste out of my mouth. It took a large refill of Caribou dark roast to eliminate the wrongness that permeated my mouth.

So much wrongness in such a small package. I don't think I'll ever be eating a McGriddle again.

Phartz

I went up Kyle's way yesterday to have breakfast with him at Lynde's in Osseo. It used to be sort of a run down looking house, but last summer they fixed it up and made it larger and more modern. We invited Ming as well, but he was at a Boy Scout event all day and couldn't go, so Kyle had a pancake for him.

That is one big pancake to layer on top of a three egg omelet full of hashbrowns. Truth be told, he ate more of half a pancake for Ming. I had the meatsa omelet and made the mistake of putting salt on it before I took a bite. I should have known an omelet full of bacon, ham, and other assorted meats wouldn't need any additional salt.

When they upgraded the building, one of the things they didn't get rid of was their old beer can collection. This one, Milwaukee Phartz, is my favorite.

Breakfastacular

In case any one doubts my commitment to being a breakfast guy.

• Saturday, Backstreet Grill (picture below - Eryn's first personal order of silver dollar pancakes).
• Monday - Original Pancake House with Andrew and Mike.
• Tuesday - Junior's (link includes a review by djneko - nice one, Pete!), by myself, after the dentist.
• Wednesday - Key's downtown with Erik before the MHTA Spring Conference.
• Thursday - scheduled breakfast with Ming at the TR cafeteria.

That simply can't be healthy. Although I did get some berries with one meal.