Text 30028, 85 rader
Skriven 2012-09-30 01:27:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: next day @Hap's 334
===========================
Time for breakfast again, groan, so Hap promised to take me
to a more me-ish type of place, which turned out to be
Marcia's Silver Spoon, home of the 1 lb hamburger and eggs
breakfast. Well, I didn't want to be faced with eggs and
toast, so I ordered a pair of half-pound burger patties from
the side order menu, as rare as you can make them, I said.
They came perhaps bigger than 8 oz each, somewhat discolored
outside, and cold congealed raw inside, which would be okay
but for the tooth-chattering temperature. I ate the first one
fine and scraped out the red interior of the second, mixing
it up with a dash of this and that and making a kind of
tartare, for which I borrowed a half slice of Hap's toast.
For dessert I had the sort of seared outside of the second
burger. The meat was impeccably fresh, very tasty, quite
fatty. (Next time I'll order one extra rare and one ordinary
rare.) As this place doesn't serve beer for breakfast or any
time. I asked for root beer, which, as I told the waitress,
at least sounds like it. A quart of Barq's, which I sucked
down without regard for caffeine or diabetes, upon which a
refill was offered, of which I accepted half. Enough for a
day-long sugar and drug high.

Hap's order was ham and eggs with toast and a side order of
sliced tomatoes, which looked pretty good. The ham steak
looked to weigh in at a bit over half a pound, a pretty good
bargain but more sodium than I could have tolerated.

Afterward, computer shopping, or rather browsing; I really
wanted to check out the ASUS netbooks that got really good
reviews in all the magazines, but all the models at all the
stores were different from the reviewed ones, if the stores
offered the brand at all. One thing I notice about the
lower-priced and smaller netbooks is that there aren't
buttons for the touchpads - you have to tap the pad for
clicking, which I don't like at all. Learning to beware of
this made the trip worthwhile.

As you can guess, no success finding anything to buy or even
look at, though there was a floor model Gateway netbook at
the Best Buy for $150 that was enticing if only to be used
as a backup hard disk.

At one store, the kid who assailed us on the floor informed
us that netbooks were on the way out and that the rest of
the world was going to smartphones and (for the unadventurous)
tablets. I told him we were very trailing edge, which gave him
a chuckle.

--

The Almond Roca outlet store has moved to new digs, still in
a soul-chilling warehouse room, still no-frills, but perhaps
smaller than before. There were a few notable bargains, the
Callebaut dark baking chocolate for $30 marked down to $25
and then with a little hand-written sign to $20 ... for a
5-kilo brick! Also the rare macadamia Roca, unwrapped seconds
at $1 for a half pound bag, so I got several and took them to
the post office to ship back; the postage was more expensive
than the candy.

Back home, leftover gizzards for lunch, accompanied by Fish
Tail pale ale, which is quite good, moderately hopped with
citrus and pine notes; also Organic.

What to do for dinner? Dither, dither. We ended up getting
some chicken from the Safeway that had treated us well the
day before; they were out of breasts, so Hap got some "tenders"
for Annie, which were bigger than any tenders I've ever seen
and quite expensive - more in fact than the breasts. Also
two thighs apiece for us. With corn on the cob from the Tacoma
Boys farmstand (officially called H&L), there was dinner. It was
a somewhat less than expected meal, as the chicken was nowhere
so fresh, juicy, or delicious as yesterday's, plus it was salty
as all getout, seemingly brined within an inch of its life. The
corn was what they call second grade fresh. Maybe third grade.

Hap had taken off work to be hostly, so we watched the
baseball game on TV. Astonishingly, the last-place Mariners
whupped the first-place Rangers 6-3. More of that preskunked
Weinhard's Blue Boar went well with dinner and the game.


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