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Last shift... for a while...
Dec. 13th, 2003 10:26 amI'm here today with Mike T. and things are pretty slow now that the weekly planning conference has come and gone. In a little less than six hours, this assignment will be eminently invoiceable.
It rained a veritable city pound of animals last night as Natalie and I returned from my birthday dinner. She took me to some place just off of Highway 59 called the Argentina Grill, which also goes by the name of "El Buen Bife." I wryly noted, as we sat down, that the Argentinian theme seemed to be running through my life these past few days, and almost looked around to see if Robert Duvall and Luciana Pedraza might be sitting at a nearby table.
What should have been a good time was clouded by something I couldn't identify while we were in the place, but which Natalie put her finger on afterward: we were treated like not entirely welcome guests, despite the fact that we ran up a tab that would leave any credit card gasping for breath (easy to do, considering the menu).
It was Natalie that called attention to the fact that the "extra olives" for my martini (a $9.00 martini, I might add) did not arrive until she asked for them a second time. (To be brutally frank, the martini was mediocre and did not merit the adjective "perfect" used on the table card... I know, I need to send things back in such cases, but I did not want to spoil the evening.) It was also Natalie that noticed how the maître d' fawned over a newly arrived couple, offering them glasses of wine on the house, and so on. In retrospect (and this might be my imagination), I wonder why we were deposited in the middle of a room while later arrivals were shown to tables at windows?
The tenderloin we ordered was very nice, indeed, but the asparagus we ordered with it was not the slim, delicate kind that's tasty and tender, but the thick kind that tastes a little woody and gives your jaws a workout as you eat it.
In any event, I well and truly threw my diet out the window last night when I ordered the flan for dessert, and later, when I had the mocha coffee with tapioca from the teahouse on Shepherd I wrote of some time ago.
The important part of the whole evening, though, was being with Natalie. 'twas a fine birthday.
Cheers...
It rained a veritable city pound of animals last night as Natalie and I returned from my birthday dinner. She took me to some place just off of Highway 59 called the Argentina Grill, which also goes by the name of "El Buen Bife." I wryly noted, as we sat down, that the Argentinian theme seemed to be running through my life these past few days, and almost looked around to see if Robert Duvall and Luciana Pedraza might be sitting at a nearby table.
What should have been a good time was clouded by something I couldn't identify while we were in the place, but which Natalie put her finger on afterward: we were treated like not entirely welcome guests, despite the fact that we ran up a tab that would leave any credit card gasping for breath (easy to do, considering the menu).
It was Natalie that called attention to the fact that the "extra olives" for my martini (a $9.00 martini, I might add) did not arrive until she asked for them a second time. (To be brutally frank, the martini was mediocre and did not merit the adjective "perfect" used on the table card... I know, I need to send things back in such cases, but I did not want to spoil the evening.) It was also Natalie that noticed how the maître d' fawned over a newly arrived couple, offering them glasses of wine on the house, and so on. In retrospect (and this might be my imagination), I wonder why we were deposited in the middle of a room while later arrivals were shown to tables at windows?
The tenderloin we ordered was very nice, indeed, but the asparagus we ordered with it was not the slim, delicate kind that's tasty and tender, but the thick kind that tastes a little woody and gives your jaws a workout as you eat it.
In any event, I well and truly threw my diet out the window last night when I ordered the flan for dessert, and later, when I had the mocha coffee with tapioca from the teahouse on Shepherd I wrote of some time ago.
The important part of the whole evening, though, was being with Natalie. 'twas a fine birthday.
Cheers...
