"I'm Too Old to Learn New Crap"

...said Mr. Pointy Sticks. We are having mail issues. There seems to be some conflict between Verizon and our old BCPL mail...sending mail is tricky now and I'm not sure that anyone out there is getting my mail. Hello? Anyone there?

Rachel (I asked her last night if I could use her name here and she just gave me a sort of fishy eye and said, "Of course you can" complete with an implied "you idiot." So there you have it....Rachel = daughter) has a friend visiting and wanted to make sure that she went back to college well fed, so the house is full of the smell of roasting chicken. Yum. Rachel took care of that...she's become quite the chicken roaster. She's requested orzo and caramelized carrots so sometime soon I have to go up and get busy with that part of dinner.

We had a disappointing time at dinner last night. We went to Zen West, this great Mexican restaurant. Waited 15 minutes or so for a table but that wasn't bad for 7 p.m. on a Saturday. Got a table and the hostess brought us chips and salsa and after about half an hour the waitress came and took our orders. Brought us our water. An hour and 20 minutes after being seated we were still sitting there and all we had gotten was the chili con queso that Rachel had ordered as an appetizer. Yes, something was terribly wrong in the kitchen. There were trays of food piled up outside the pass-through that apparently weren't the right dishes. And at one point our waitress brought a huge tray of food to the table next to us but two of the things weren't things anyone at that table had ordered. A few minutes later, the hostess hustled over to that table with a sizzling plate of fajitas...they hadn't ordered them either. ( I should have tackled her as she sped past and captured the food for us.) We asked our waitress if we could at least get the tossed salads we had ordered and some more iced tea. Fifteen minutes later, after getting no salad and no new drinks and noticing that people seated well after us were being served, we decided to leave. The manager apologized profusely and wouldn't let us pay for the chili con queso or iced tea we had had. But was a disappointment. We rushed to Trader Joe's with ten minutes to spare before it closed and we all grabbed sandwiches (and some other stuff) but it wasn't the same.