Three F's

I kept meaning to update this week and kept not getting to it, so I decided to do a weekend roundup instead. Think of these as mini-updates, I guess.

1) I Drank It For Science

Last week I was at the grocery store and noticed that now that Halloween has come and gone, we’ve ventured into the Christmas retail season. When I was little this never used to happen until after Thanksgiving, but now the trees and garland and lights go up in the stores on November first, and that means they have eggnog at Food City. I was getting milk anyway, so I glanced at the eggnog section and stopped in my tracks when I saw this:



Pumpkin is a strange food. Pumpkin pie, by itself, is delicious, more so with whipped cream on it. Pumpkin seeds are also delicious. Pumpkin anything else, though, tends toward the sketchy. There’s a reason why they don’t have pumpkin candy or pumpkin pudding or pumpkin soda (Jones Soda Company doesn’t count, since they only make it this season). It’s because, for every delicious pumpkin filled vegetarian ravioli, there is also a Starbucks Pumpkin Latte that tastes like a regular cup of coffee with a can of pumpkin pie filling poured in to make it extra-vile.

With this is mind, I was skeptical of the pumpkin pie spice eggnog. I mentioned it to a few friends, and the general consensus was best expressed by my friend MegaBigEye, who said, “Probably disgusting. With the off chance of being delicious.” Confused and curious, I finally bought it this week because I decided that I just had to know.

And it was delicious.

2) Fire?

I feel bad for the people at my apartment complex office sometimes, because our emergencies always seem to come in pairs or trios.

Last year, for example, lightning hit my building right before Easter. The power went out, and stayed out for several days because the lightning bolt fried the meters at the end of the building. They put us up for a week in a nice business traveler’s motel with suites and DVD players and kitchens in the rooms, and one night I was laying in bed in my suite, waiting to have power in my apartment again, and saw, “Meth lab found in local apartment complex” on the evening news. As I watched, I thought, “That complex has balconies that look just like mine.”

That’s because it was my complex. Fortunately the meth lab was at the other end, and, oddly enough, meth labs are pretty much normal neighbors in Tennessee. I was worried that it meant I’d moved to a really shady apartment complex, but my coworkers assured me that, no, it happens to everybody.

Anyway, this week we had a huge water main break. I don’t know if it flooded anyone’s apartment, but it wrecked the landscaping by the exercise room, and they had to shut off the water for a few hours on Thursday and Friday to work on it. Wednesday night, though, the same day it broke, we had terrible thunderstorms, and they set off the fire alarms in the building next to mine:



Thankfully there wasn’t a real fire, and I didn’t miss “Top Model”.

Or, you know, lose all my belongings in a cloud of flame and smoke.

3) The Last Home Game

Today was our last home game, so it was my last weekend working at the gates. I usually get to mine a half hour or so before we’re supposed to open, but today I was running a little late and didn’t get there until five minutes before, which meant the parade had already started and I had to push through the crowd to get to the stadium.



Next year I’ll be on time more.