May 8, 2007

-- I haven’t seen Toney in days. Or so it seems. She went to that seminar deal in Philadelphia over the weekend, something to do with her job, and has been dragged around by her shopping-addicted mother ever since she returned. I’m starting to miss her.

Yesterday she came in from work and, before she could even lay down her purse, Sunshine said, “I thought we were going shopping?!” This was said in the standard impatient, irritated tone of the full-grown Veruca Salt.

We were supposed to have fish for dinner last night, and all the trimmings, but Sunny kept Toney hostage at a strip mall and it was decided we’d go out to a restaurant instead.

Toney called my cell phone (I was outside washing her car at the time) and asked if I could meet them at Don Pablo’s at 6 o’clock, and I said I could. Then she called back and said Don Pablo’s wasn’t acceptable to the queen, and we’d be going to Ruby Tuesday instead.

Whatever. Who cares, really?

The Secrets and I were there at the requested time, but, of course, the other party was not. It turns out Sunny had insisted they go into Wal-Mart to look at clothes(?!). And they couldn’t get her out of there. The Other Party was about twenty minutes late, and that’s standard.

I ordered something called the Chicken BLT, and the salad bar. They have a really kick-ass salad bar at that place…. Everybody else ordered sandwiches as well, except for Sunshine who went with the big honkin’ Flintstones rack of ribs. Which, needless to say, turned out to be “shit.”

The woman huffed and puffed during the entire meal, and used roughly forty napkins. Some kid at a nearby table kept humming the whole time, and I thought my loving mother-in-law was about to physically attack the child. Indeed, she had to be talked-out of confronting the parents.

After we convinced her to put down the gun, so to speak, she sighed theatrically and removed a small, ornate case from her purse. She flipped it open and removed yet another of her “antibiotics,” then gobbled it down. This was apparently so she’d be able to cope with both the humming (a personal attack), and the barbecue sauce that was conspiring against her.

Once dinner was finished (everybody was satisfied except one person), I asked Toney if she wanted to get a beer with me somewhere. Hell, I hadn’t said twenty face-to-face words to her in days.

So we decided that S&M would take the kids home, and Toney and I would go for a cuppa two tree pints at a new Irish pub that just opened here. We promised to only be gone for an hour or so, and we were true to our word.

The joint is called Kildare’s and seems pretty darn cool. Last night they had $4 pints of Guinness, and $3 pints of Harp. I went with the latter, because I was really full and Guinness is like liquid food. I didn’t want to blow-out my stomach lining, and have to be rushed into emergency surgery where plastic netting would be installed beneath bright lights. No, I can't have that.

We had a good time, except for the so-called Irish Jam. This “jam” consisted of one man, an acoustic guitar, and a stack of powerful amplifiers up near the front window. The shit was so loud it was hard to talk in there. And he was performing songs by such well-known Irishmen as Johnny Cash and Morrissey. 

When the guy announced he was going to take a break, spontaneous applause broke out. He sounded OK, but needed to dial that bastard back a few notches. Shit.

Oh, and there was the couple sitting beside us drinking, get this, Coors Light. This place has some of the best beers in the world on tap at reasonable prices, and they were downing cut-rate mass-produced swill from plastic, big-mouth bottles. 

At one point I said, a little too loudly, “They both should be arrested, and taken to prison!” Some people, I’m convinced, like the idea of drinking beer, but don’t really like beer itself. And it’s none of my business, but it irritates me.

After the boys went to bed, we all watched Sunday’s episode of The Sopranos. We had the previous four installments saved to the DVR, and S&M got caught-up on them in one sitting, I think.

Apparently the “antibiotics” were kicking-in last night, because Sunny drifted in and out of consciousness during the whole show. Every once in a while she’d jerk awake and yell, “Who?  Where??” At one point she started snoring like a truck driver, Mumbles gave her an elbow, and one of Sunshine’s legs kicked way up in the air like a Rockette’s. 

I was just thankful her shoe didn’t fly off and go through the screen of our Big Ass Television.

And that was Monday, and now it’s Tuesday. Sunshine is trying to convince me to go with her and Mumbles to some sort of “casino” in Wilkes-Barre this morning . There’s no chance that’ll happen, of course, because I’d end up being stranded and near-tears inside a Marshall’s or a TJ Maxx all day. 

As that great American philosopher Kid Rock once said, “I was born at night, but not last night, baby.”

See you guys tomorrow.

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Last updated
01/17/12 12:12 PM

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