The Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald’s restaurants where they are then likely to order food that is too high in calories, fat and salt.

I agree.  So here’s my solution McDonalds.  Or Center for Science in the Public Interest:  Serve Happy Meals with homework inside.  Or a list of chores.  That will keep my kids from ordering one, I can tell you that!

On Aug 4, 2009, at 3:31 PM, GEORGE KWATAMA wrote:

From: The Manager, Credit and foreign Bills,
First National Bank
6th Floor, First Place
Cnr Simmonds & Pritchard Street,
Johannesburg, Gauteng
South Africa.

Dear Partner,

PLEASE TREAT AS VERY CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT.

My name is George Kwatama, I am the manager of Credit and Foreign bills of FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA. I am writing in respect of a foreign customer of our bank with account number 620 44 263 900 whose name is Chung Timothy (Mr.), an American citizen who died in a plane crash with the whole passengers onboard. And for your perusal you can view this website.
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9708/06/guam.passenger.list.
Since the demise of this customer, I personally have watched with keen interest to see the next of kin but all has proved abortive as no one has come to claim his funds of US$9.5M (Nine Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) which has been with our branch since the death of this customer.

The reason why I contacted you is that this morning, I got an information that the late customer (Mr. Chung Timothy’s) account will be closed and the funds in it will be confiscated by the bank if the customer next of kin does not come up to make claim for the funds. On this note, I decided to seek for whom his name shall be used as the
Next of Kin or Trustee as no one has come up as his next of kin. I do not want the fund to be recalled to the bank treasury as unclaimed fund or shared amongst the bank executives. So I have decided to contact you to see if we can do this transaction together, because I am an insider in the bank, I will give you all the information that might be needed by the bank. For your assistant I am willing to give you 30% of the total amount.
Upon the receipt of your response, I will send you by fax or e-mail an international bank transfer form , which you will complete, sign and send back to me in order to enable us start the processing of this claim. I will not fail to bring to your notice that this business is hitch free and that you should not entertain any fear as all modalities for the smooth and easy transfer of this fund has been finalized, this transaction will be completed within 14 bank working days of receiving your response.

Please include your private contact details i.e. Your Full names and Contact address, your occupation, Age and Tel/Fax numbers for quick communication and filling of claims for the procurement of the necessary legal documents to back up our claims.

Anticipating your urgent response.
`
Yours Sincerely,

George Kwatama

Manager Credit and Foreign Bills.
FNB South Africa.
TEL: +27-785-437-526
Email:georgekwatama2009@gmail.com

MY RESPONSE

Date: August 4, 2009 3:41:28 PM EDT
To: <georgekwatama2009@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: PLEASE CAN WE PARTNER WITH UTMOST CONFIDENTIALITY AND TRUST ON THIS SUBJECT MATTER?

From:  The Queen of Sheba, House of Parliament of the Land of Nee

Dear Partner,

My name is the Queen of Sheba.  I am sorry to hear of your loss.  I have a similar problem.  My entire family was taken by aliens to the planet Groth, leaving me with $5 billion US.  It’s all in cash and stuffed into the walls of my palace in Dogpatch, Idaho.  I need someone of a trusting and slightly devious mind, someone like YOU, to help me.  Please, can you come to my palace and rip out my walls and take my money to a bank in your country for safe keeping?  I will gladly pay you $1 billion US for your most excellent services.

Please let me know.  As you say, you should not entertain any fear as all modalities for the easy transfer of the funds from my walls to your bank account has been finalized.  It will be a simple matter for you to either swallow the $5 billion US (contained in condoms of course) or deposit them in your anal canal for transfer through immigration.

This is most urgent and very distressing to me.  I hope to hear from you soon!

Q.Sheba

—–

My mom made me a birthday cake even though I said I wasn’t going to celebrate until my husband returned home.  When I first saw it on the counter I disregarded it, almost like I didn’t even register that this was a birthday cake.  I think my subconscious knew before I really knew – Mom and her recipe tweaking had struck again.

—

She used to make these angel food confections for my birthdays that had this fluffy whipped cream pink topping made from strawberry jello mix.  The cake would have multi-colored sprinkles baked into the batter, making it look like a party favor had exploded inside.  They were gorgeous and delicious, round and pink.

—

This cake was round.  And it was pink, yes.  But something was wrong with the frosting.  It looked sad, depressed even…sliding down the cake to lay in piles on the plate below.  The strawberries that had been mixed into the frosting looked like they’d been in a bar fight.

—

After dinner we cut into the cake.  Interesting.  The first thing I noticed was that there was something keeping the knife from cutting through.  A two-handed grip was used and proved successful in dividing up the pieces amongst the diners.  The second thing I noticed was that the sprinkles inside had all joined together in one spot, about midway through the cake, like survivors clinging together on a sinking ship.

—

The entire top layer of the cake was not the fluffy, white, angel food I remembered from years past.  In its place was about a three quarter inch layer of white gummy bear material.  Did my mother put gummy bears in the cake, you ask?  No, she did not.  Did my mother use gelatin in my cake you ask?  No, she did not.  Rather, because she could not find her angel food pan, she used a silicon rubber pan to bake the cake instead.

—

Who’da thought that the type of pan used would turn out to be so critical?  Apparently, an angel food pan allows the fluffy cake to rise to its full height, and it is designed to cool in an upside down position to make sure the cake doesn’t fall or compact down onto itself.  For future reference, a compacted angel food cake, is a lot like a large, white, somewhat grainy, gummy bear.

—

Everyone liked their Gummy Bearish Cake, and truth be told, only one piece now remains.  Thanks for the birthday memories Mom!  (email me for the recipe)

Mom: “Yeah, I know.  Go ahead.”

My mother is a great sport.  Obviously I’ve inherited that gene from her, because I keep eating her food.  As my mom tells it, she used to be a great cook.  I do seem to remember a pretty nice chicken casserole she made when we were kids, although it was never the same recipe twice.  The three things that remained constants were (1) chicken, (2) croutons on the top, and (3) something green floating inside it because Mom says healthy dishes have something green in them.

I also remember our favorite dish as kids – we called it “Barf Chicken”.  She baked chicken breasts with red wine and parmesan cheese.  The smell is what inspired the naming of this dish.

My mom’s problem is not that she’s a bad cook.  It’s that she feels as though every recipe (ever written) could do with a bit of tweaking on her part.  As if it’s just shy of perfect the way it’s written, but she’s going to make it better either with additions, deletions or substitutions.  The fact that most recipes have made it through pretty strenuous tests and edits before they made it to paper is lost on my mom.

I could dedicate an entire blog to her kitchen creations/manglings, but instead I’ll just stick with this post for this week’s fare.  Last week I had a tough time.  My father-in-law was very ill, my husband was out of town caring for him, and I was busy with work and kids.  Mom was kind enough to come to my house and start dinner for me and the kids one night.  I walked in to see her pouring a bag of shredded cheese into a pot of water.

“Umm, whacha makin’, Mom?”

“Broccoli Cheese Soup!”

“Wow, awesome.  Are you using a recipe?” fear slipping into my voice…

“Yep.”

About a half hour later, Mom is standing at the stove, and I hear, “Well, shit.”

“What’s up, Mom?  Something wrong?”

“Well, this stuff doesn’t look right.  I don’t know what the hell I did wrong.”

“Did you follow the recipe?”

“Well, kinda.”  Well kinda.  Yeah.  I should have known something was up.

“What did you change from the recipe directions, Mom?”

“Well, nothing really.  It’s just that the recipe called for Velveeta cheese and I substituted a different cheese.  I hate Velveeta cheese.”

“What kind of cheese did you use?”  I mean, how bad can it be?  Cheddar?

“Non-fat cheese.”

Alas.  My mom did not understand that broccoli cheese soup is creamy and cheesy because of ALL THE FAT in the cheese and only Velveeta, that disgusting manufactured transfat frankenstein of a cheese, will melt into a soup-like construct.

The plasticky non-fat orange stuff (I refuse to call it cheese anymore) had clung in clumps to the broccoli and the water, which was still the consistency of water, had turned bright orange.

Voila!  Broccoli Cheese Clump Soup! (email me for the recipe)

My best friend in the ‘hood was Rhoda Williams.  She lived about a mile away in the same neighborhood, around the corner from me.  I have no idea how I met Rhoda, maybe she went to the same private school where I went, although I don’t remember seeing here there.  We were too young (ages 7-9) to walk too far from our homes unsupervised, so I must have met her in some other setting other than playing after school on the street.

Where I grew up, I was not exposed to many people from other places or anyone of different color much. There was one Indian girl in my classes named Amani (who I remember never brushed her teeth, but had the most beautiful, long black hair always worn in thick braids) and one black boy named Bill Green (who was skinny and shy).  My friend Rhoda was also black, and as far as I can remember, part of the only black family in our entire neighborhood.  At the time, I didn’t think anything about it.  It’s only looking back that I realize all the people around me, for the most part, looked a lot like me.  Whitebread.

I remember one day Rhoda and I were walking from my house to her house, arguing about the color of her skin.  She kept trying to tell me she was BLACK, and I kept arguing with her that she wasn’t BLACK, she was BROWN.  Even then I thought I was always right (things haven’t changed much since), so I refused to back down.  I remember pointing out some soil that had risen above the dried grasses and saying how that was the color black and that the color of her skin certainly was not that color.  I told her that her skin was the color of my mom’s coffee, which was BROWN.  She stood firm, and asserted that her dad told her she was BLACK, so she was BLACK, and that was that.

I slept over her house that night, and when we went to bed, she had to put a plastic shower cap type thing over her hair before she laid down.  I asked her what it was for, and she said it was to protect her pillow.  I wanted to know what she was protecting her pillow from, but she didn’t know.  That’s just what she had to do every night before bed.  I remember thinking that it looked uncomfortable.  Now that I’m older, I’m thinking it would make me crazy to have to sleep with a plastic covering over my head every night.

The next morning, at breakfast, we were all eating cereal.  She ate the same kind of cereal I did.  And then her dad came down.  He told her to go get her “things”.  She left the table, and I sat there, waiting to see what “things” she was going to bring to her dad.  This house was different and yet the same. The food was the same.  Rhoda’s bedroom was the same, girly and full of cool toys and books.  But she wore different things to bed, and her dad was there at the breakfast table.  My dad never was.  My friend came back with a brush and a jar.  In the jar was some pink goop.  Rhoda’s dad unscrewed the top and reached into the jar to get some of the goop out, and then proceeded to smear it all over Rhoda’s hair! And then he used the brush to smooth her hair out.

Ah-ha! my little brain said to itself.  Now I see the reason for the plastic hair bag.  That gooey stuff would surely ruin a pillowcase, just like the gum I went to sleep with one day did to my pillowcase.  I noticed that the gooey stuff made her hair look shiny and smooth.  I’d never seen a father play with his daughter’s hair like that.  I’d never seen a father brush a daughter’s hair before.  I was jealous that she got this kind of attention from her dad every morning.

While Rhoda patiently waited through her dad’s ministrations, she said, “Dad, Elle says that I’m not black.  She says that I’m BROWN.”  She looked at me, daring me to say differently now.  Her dad intimidated the crap out of me.  He wasn’t particularly big, and I remember him to be an intellectual sort.  But he was a dad, and he didn’t say much to me, so he was naturally kind of scary that way.  He looked at me and frowned and reassured his daughter that they were in fact BLACK and not BROWN.  He didn’t talk to me, he only talked to her.  I remember feeling like I was rude, but I didn’t know what I said to be rude.  I remember mumbling back that her skin sure looked BROWN to me.  I don’t remember if he dignified this with a response, but I also don’t remember him explaining the whole thing to me either.  I wonder today how he might have done that.  I wonder because my daughter came home this week telling me she had a new friend at school who is BROWN.

When I figured out who she was talking about (determining that this new friend was of African descent and not Latin American), I told her that her friend is not BROWN but she is BLACK.  My daughter screwed her face up in concentration and then said that no, she was not black, she was definitely BROWN.  I tried to explain to her that the color black was not just referring to the color of her skin, but of other things too.  Of course, being my daughter, she needed to know what other “things”; but I had no answer for her.  I’m sitting here thinking and thinking, and I still can’t figure it out.  Why are my BROWN friends BLACK?  Is it because native African people are so dark they actually don’t look brown anymore, they look black, so it became a blanket description?  And now that I think about it, I’m not really white either.  I’m more peach or olivey-beige than white.  I have only seen a couple of really white folk and they were albinos; but even they were a bit pink.

Can we dispense with trying to identify each other by the color of our skin by saying where we come from?  I’m American.  My great-grandparents were Italian.  My friend Rhoda is American.  Maybe her great-great-great grandparents were African.  I guess the problem with identifying ourselves by our citizenship means that the color of our skin can no longer be specifically identified to another person. I’m wondering if that’s something that should matter.  Does it matter if the person I saw, or met, or interviewed, or dated is white, black, peach, brown, or beige?  Is it enough to say, “He was an American,” or “He was Haitian.”?

I know that for a while there, African-American was the politically correct way to refer to someone who I used to call Black.  Now it sounds kind of silly, like someone trying way too hard not to offend someone.  Does that mean I should be called an Italian-American?  Problem with that moniker is my mom’s side of the family is English and Irish.  Am I an Italian-English-Irish American?  No, that would be ridiculous.  And what if a black person has some Italian mixed in there somewhere?  Or Haitian?  Do they become African-Italian-Haitian American?  Some people use “person of color” to describe a person of dark skin.  But that sounds silly too.  I can imagine the conversations going something like, “Yeah, I met a really cute guy last night.  He was tall, about 25, and he’s of color.”  What?

The problem with trying to erase the color from our conversations is that it ignores the fact that oftentimes, with different colors come different cultures.  Sometimes my kids will be telling me a story about what someone did in class or on the bus or on the sports field, and I’m tempted to ask, “What color is he/she?”  Because it’s true that BROWN people and PEACHY-BEIGE people often act differently in similar situations. I find myself giving a kid a “pass” from judgment if they are acting like people of their like color act, even when it’s different than how I want my kids to act.  I say to myself, “that’s how They do things.”  Is that awful?  It sounds bad writing it.  But it’s true for me.  I don’t think it would be fair for me to expect kids who were raised with different cultural norms to act like I expect my kids to act, and vice versa.  And that’s not to say that it’s necessarily a skin-color thing.  If you’re raised in a certain culture, you act with those cultural norms, regardless of the color of your skin.

I don’t have any answers for the world’s problems here.  This post was borne of my surprise that the questions I faced thirty years ago, are still being asked today by my own children.  I guess I haven’t figured it out.  I wonder if my kids will before their kids are born.  I will say that if I ever do ask one of my kids what color someone is after hearing one of their stories, they seem surprised at the question. Like they never considered that and don’t see its relevance.  I see that as a step in the right direction anyway.

There’s this one thing that female and gay waitstaff do sometimes when they come to my table that either cracks me up or ticks me off, depending on my mood.  It’s that crazy thing where they come up to the table and then start talking to you in a high pitched, saccharine sweet tone, usually while cocking their heads to the side.  It’s a tone you know they never use when just talking with someone in a normal conversation.  When it’s used with the phrase, “How ARE we tonight?” it’s even that much better.  

I’m tempted to answer in the same tone, just to see what they’ll do.  But I’m pretty sure I know what they’ll do; they’ll get all pissed that I’m being bitchy (they will fail to notice that I’m speaking exactly as they are), and then they’ll serve me a hawk-tooey entree.  One of those meals with a little something special added to it, just for me (usually a bodily fluid of some sort, or something belonging in the trash).

When they ask me how WE are doing, I’m tempted to answer with, “Well, I don’t know how YOU are doing, but I am doing just fine, thanks.”  Yeah, hawk-tooey burger on that one too.  I know my answer sounds bitchy, but isn’t this thing they’re throwing out at my table an absurd question, begging for an absurd answer?  What if I say, “WE are fine, aren’t WE?  WE are going to give ME a free appetizer, right?” Can they say no to that, since they technically made themselves part of my group? Hmmmmm, perhaps not.

I am open to suggestions from anyone out there.  Let’s start a movement.  The No-More-Helium-Voiced-Waitstaff Movement.  I’m not sure what to do about the whole WE thing though.  I will wait for inspiration to strike and report back.  Peace out.

Now that you have an overview of the system, and therefore a basis for my bitterness, I can move on to the subject at hand.  Because I have two kids at different ages (one cheerleader and one football player), we of course have different game schedules.  We have 3 schedules in fact.  Yes, I know, the math is not working for you.  Let me explain…my daughter as a cheerleader has to cheer for two teams.  There were so many kids in this one league they split them in two.  So one week she cheers for one team and the other week she cheers for the other.  This means we have the added treat of negotiating an additional game schedule onto our calendars. Her games are around 1pm and my son’s games are around 7pm.  This essentially means that our Saturdays are shot.  We have to get to the field at 12:30, watch cheering (the same 5 cheers over and over and over and over….) until 3:00.  We pack up our camping gear (chairs, umbrellas, blankets, cooler) and are outta there by 3:15.  Then we have to leave our house at 5:15 for an away game to get to our son’s field by 5:45 for a 7:00 game.  Yes, this coach likes to be extra prepared and he does love his pre-game motivational speeches.  It’s a good thing my kids are so damn cute.

So, being the dutiful mother I am, and recovering sports-neglectful-mom that I have been in the past, I printed out the various game schedules and magnetized them to our refrigerator so we wouldn’t miss a single moment of Pop Warner bliss.  To avoid confusion, I even wrote my kids’ names at the top of the corresponding schedules.  My son was standing at the fridge yesterday and he says in this 13 year old, condescending, humored tone, “Mom, you’re such a spaz.  You put the wrong schedule up here.  Duh.” I ignored the tone (rather than tackle him and give him a good rug burn on his forehead which is probably what he deserved, disrespectful little turd that he is), and responded, “Oh no I didn’t.”

“Oh yes you did Mom, wanna bet?”  We’ve had many a betting incident in our house, and so I thought my son had learned his lesson.  Basically we’ve tried to drive home the points that 1) gambling is unhealthy, 2) gambling causes you to lose all your dog washing money, and 3) gambling causes fights between siblings that piss The Parents off, so is generally not worth it, even if you win.  He forgot those points I guess.  

“Sure,” I responded, “how much do you want to bet?” I was laying my weblike trap for his hapless soul, and he was too young and blinded by his rightness to see it being woven around him.

“A hundred bucks!”  he responded, with glee in his devilish eyes.  He was probably already spending the money he was dreaming of fleecing from his retarded mother on Skittles and games for his Nintendo DS.

After ascertaining that he didn’t have $100, we settled on a bet for $20.  I gave him a few chances to back out of the bet so that I would be able to go to sleep without guilt and of course to make the winning that much more glorious.

He grabbed the schedules off the fridge and yelled, “AH HA!!! See!!  J-P-W??  I DON’T PLAY FOR JUPITER PEE WEE!!!!!!  DUH!!!!!!  YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG TOWN AND THE WRONG LEAGUE, LOSER!!! NOW PAY UP!!!”  I responded by smiling.  All cool like, without a trace of fear.  This worried him.  His smile got less bright and his manner less jubilant.  (I can be really scary when I do that look.)  ”What?” he said, with trepidation.  ”Why are you smiling like that?”

“Take a look at the top of that page, son, and tell me what you see.”  He looked at the sheet and then across his face I saw confusion, followed shortly by sheepishness.  I continued, “Do you see something written at the top of that page in BOLD, BLACK handwriting?  Your sister’s name perhaps?  The girl that cheers for JUNIOR-PEE-WEE??”  I paused for effect.  ”Now take a look at the last sheet.  The one that has your name at the top of it.  Isn’t that your correct schedule?”

“Yeah,” he responded, already letting the bitterness sink in to his gut, “but that was confusing you know.  I can’t really be to blame for not getting that.”  What he didn’t get was that he was holding his sister’s schedules in his hand.  His schedules were under it. 

“Yeah, whatever, hand over my twenty bucks LOSER.  And next time, pay attention when I try to warn you and give you chances to back out of a bet with me.”

My son handed over his hard earned cash and tried to pout for a few minutes, but even he couldn’t deny the sheer awesomeness of my power.  He had to laugh at himself for being so quick to label me stupid and clueless.  Our history has shown that I will gladly admit when I’m stupid and clueless, it’s generally a situation of which I am well aware and am happy to report to whomever will listen.  When I act cocky, I have good reason.  

So all’s well that ends well.  I got money to buy my favorite popcorn and some goobers for movie night, and my son got a very valuable lesson.  Don’t gamble with money you want to use for video games, and don’t mess with Mom, especially when she’s being nice and smiling too much.  Parents: eight thousand nine hundred and twenty one, Kids: ZIP!

Recently I was reminded of this habit my mom has of trying to make unhealthy things healthy when I bit into one of her “healthy” bran muffins.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a recipe for a really good, moist, sweet bran muffin, but if you have, you know that they are anything but healthy.  In exchange for some fiber, you must accept that you are going to be required to eat about a half a cup of sugar and half a stick of butter and oil in each muffin. Seriously, that muffin is going from your lips to the hanging fat on the back of your arms or the new butt plateau you’ve been growing since you hit age 37. There’s not much to recommend a bran muffin from my cardiologist’s perspective.

But my mom thinks she has found a way to change all that.  ”Bran muffins for all!” she says.  There’s no reason why bran muffins can’t be healthy, healthy, healthy!  

Au contraire, Mother, there is a reason, and you have soundly proved that to me this day. From her lips, to my fingers, to your eyes, this is how it went:  

MOM:  ”See, I was making these bran muffins, and I decided that there was much too much oil and butter and sugar; so what I did was use flax seed oil instead of the butter and oil.  And then I realized that I had soaked the bran but forgot to put it in the mix, so by the time I put it in my mixture, it wasn’t acting right [this should have been a warning sign to my mom, but she regularly ignores those], so I decided to add some extra things in the mixture to buff it up a bit [she 'buffs up' mixes every time she bakes or cooks, usually with something green because she tells me green=healthy].  I think they turned out pretty healthy, if I do say so myself.”

She brought a muffin to me at work (she works across the hall from me in another office), and I was starving because I hadn’t eaten any breakfast.  I was typing away at the computer, as I bit into the muffin, not paying attention to what I was eating.  As I was chewing, I lost my focus on my work.  My mouth came across some weird textures as they floated across my tongue and teeth. And I noticed that this particular muffin was not sweet and moist, but dry and…dry.  What?  Did she forget the sugar? And what the hell is that crunchy thing?  I pulled the muffin away from my face to take a good look at it, to see if maybe it had been wrapped in paper. I was thinking that maybe I had eaten the paper wrapping around the muffin or something.  But there was no paper.

So I’m chewing and looking at the exposed insides of this muffin that had some suspicious red and green things suspended in its cooked batter.  What is going on here?  I emailed my mother:  ”What the hell did you do to this poor bran muffin?  Next  time you decide to make muffins with chunks of copy paper inside them, warn me first!”

She emailed me back:  ”You ungrateful brat.  Next time I’m not sharing my heawfy muffins with you, and I’m going to eat them all myself.”  Her reference to “heawfy” is to a time when I was a single mom with two babies (ages 2 and 4), living with her because I was as poor as dirt and couldn’t afford a place of my own.  While we lived there with her she cooked up all these tweaked recipes, with green things in every single one of them, of course.  She made these godawful cookies (that had a lot of nerve going by the moniker ‘cookie’ I’ll tell you) that tasted like cardboard (flax seeds, pumpkin seeds, bran flour, fake sweetener, flax oil…you get the idea), and my little babies ate those things right up.  ”Weeeeee!  Gwamma’s makin’ heawfy cookies for us!!!! Yaaaayyyyyyy!!! I yuv heawfy cookies, we yuv heawfy coooookies!!”  It’s all my damn kids’ fault. They encouraged this craziness, and now we’re all stuck with it.  Thanks a lot piglets.

That bran muffin I had been tricked into eating had pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, and I’m pretty sure spit balls in it.  It’s true, I was an ungrateful brat not appreciating having my heawfy breakfast hand delivered to my desk, but my colon thanked my mom. And truth be told, I’m going to continue to eat every single heawfy thing she delivers to my desk in the morning because she’s my mom, and I love her.  And while her efforts maybe a bit misguided, they are done from the heart, and that’s all that matters.

So, if you’re reading, thanks for the heawfy bran muffin Mom.  Next time though, can you add some sugar to the mix?  Please?

When my husband, kids and I first moved to Florida, we found out soon enough that we were in for a special treat.  The drive thrus in Florida are manned by some very interesting people indeed. With little exception, most of them have some serious, kickass attitude.  I’m not exactly sure why they’re working, because they don’t seem happy to be there, and they’re definitely not in any hurry to get the job done.  ”Fast food” in Florida, if accurately named, would be something more like “Fast If I Damn Well Feel Like It, And I Probably Won’t Food”.  Maybe it’s some sort of mass work-release program with which I’ve been confronted.  In any case, it’s always an event when we go, and while irritating at the time, generally ends up giving us endless free entertainment along with our transfats; so all in all, it’s a value meal for certain!

Our first trip for some Drive Thru ‘Tude was at place called ‘Checkers’.  We had little kids at the time, who ate happy meals and drank milk only.  (Mommy gets the soda and beer, and kids get the milk)  So we drive up to the speaker and my husband proceeds to give our order to the Checkers drive-thru lady, telling her that we’d like milk with our kids’ meals.  We heard a commotion (it sounded like someone bobbing her head from side to side muttering something like “oh no you dit-n’t”), and then her voice came over the speaker loud and clear with, “WE AIN’T GOT NO MILK!”  Only, the word “milk” sounded more like “meelk”.  

So my husband looks at me, and I look at him.  We send telepathic messages to one another (we don’t speak our thoughts aloud because 1) we have kids and know those words will be repeated at the wrong time some day in the future, and 2) we don’t want to eat hawk-tooey hamburgers, so we are careful not to piss off the drive thru lady), and then my husband responds with, “Well, what do you use to make milk shakes then?”  This menu had about ten different milkshakes you could order, so it was a valid question.  As if speaking to a person with serious mental retardation, she responds, “SHAKE MIX!”  Only, the word “shake” sounded more like “shayek” and the work “mix” sounded more like “meeyix”.  

Okaaaay then.  We’ll just have three shakes then.  Vanilla.  Thank you ma’am.  Thank you for not putting “extras” in our hamburgers.  We really appreciate all your hard work here in the drive-thru at the Checkers today.  And your professionalism, that was much appreciated as well.

As we drove away from Checkers, and starting divvying up the goodies, I realized we were missing the fries for every order.  Sigh.  Did we go back?  No.  I wasn’t in the mood for eating a bag of fries that I knew would contain some that were probably scooped up from the floor (to teach me a lesson, no doubt). We just took our lumps and left, sans milk, sans fries, looking forward to the next opportunity we would have to submit ourselves to a good f(*#ing in the drive thru.