Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Drive-Thru... Milk?
February 01, 2006

We pack lunches for Abby at school every weekday. Sure, she doesn’t eat a whole lot, but she does love her milk. She gets disappointed when the beverage in her lunch is not milk, complaining when we have to use a juice box.

We usually pack a personal-sized container of Parmalat in her lunch. It’s great because it doesn’t require refrigeration when stored. The only problem with Parmalat is the cost.

Berta was telling me after her recent shopping trip that it would be cheaper to go through the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru in the morning and buy a small carton of refrigeration-required milk than it is to buy the Parmalat. I don’t doubt it. The Parmalat is around $2.67 for three boxes, and it seems that the Chick-Fil-A milk is around $.60 each. Being that Chick-Fil-A is on the route to Abby’s school, it woudn’t be much of a detour, either.

I was thinking about this the other day while dropping Abby off at school with her Parmalat milk box, when I noticed a weird sign in the nearby open lot. The sign read, “Swiss Farm Stores”…

Is it just me? - Haircuts
January 31, 2006

Once again it’s time for… Is it just me? The gameshow where I complain about some issue that everyone deals with, and you all weigh in with your opinion on the matter.

This episode’s topic: Haircuts.

I know that there are many differences between the male and female hair treatments. Most men I’ve met would rather find the cheapest barber they can (“Uncle Lou only charged me $3 – Sure, he’s nearly blind and only has the use of one arm, but… cheap!”) and women seem to head for the more frilly places (“I was going to drive home right after my hair appointment, but I had too many of their free mimosas, so I went shopping instead”). This is a hasty generalization that I’m sure will earn me no respect for having written it.

Nonetheless, I must admit to a certain affinity to a $30 salon hair-do. As I was explaining to Berta, if you find the right stylist, there’s definitely something to the scalp kneading that occurs during the shampooing phase. It nearly triggers that blissful reaction in me that you see with some dogs when you scratch them in just the right spot. Moving on…

The reason I bring up this whole hair issue is because I had mine mostly chopped off yesterday. And during the process, as usual, the stylist wanted to know how I wanted my hair done. Allow me to pose this question to the guys in the audience: Do you really know what to say to answer this question?

Shrimp Biscuits
January 30, 2006

Saturday was a pretty nice day over the weekend, and rather than fall into the same TV-watching rut we seem to have been in since Christmas, Berta and I took the kids out to play at the Oasis Family Fun Center. I had taken the kids there once before myself, with Dan and his two kids. Abby and Riley had a pretty good time, and there was no reason to expect that they wouldn’t on this occasion, too.

The Oasis is a warehouse-style building that is somewhat off the beaten path. Inside, they’ve got miniature golf, redemption games, and - the reason why we went - a giant playground. It’s one of those playgrounds like they have at Chuck E Cheese’s, with the tubes that the kids climb in, but it’s enormous.

The playground has 4 big-kid slides and one for toddlers. A nice thing about this playground is that it has a toddler area. Too often, they want to go play with their older siblings and they just aren’t big enough. And yet, we ended up letting Riley crawl around in there, too.