Last Night

It was fun and crazy last night.

After picking up Lindsay and Emily from work, and dropping my little folk off at their favorite place "Camp Geezer", the girls and I rushed home to get ready to go.  The Hospitality Lane gals, brought Grandma Georgia along (it was so fun having you with us, Georgia!) arrived and we finally left.  

The city was really crowded last night, could find a place to park on the street, Rachel's had a line out the door and enough people waiting to get in already, that we KNEW we would need to come another day.  

Becky mentioned a place near the college that she thought might be interesting, so we went there.  This is where some of the fun and craziness happens.

We walk in, there are tables available, but they are not cleared yet.  The guy who greeted us said, "Let me go make a noose, kill myself and then I will be back to help you."  This was said because being a party of 6 that meant he had to take the time to clear a table.  This took just a couple of minutes then we sat down with the assurance that our waiter would be there to take our drink order in a few minutes.

We waited 20 minutes.  He finally came by took our drink order and returned about 10 minutes later with 4 waters (one with lemon) and two Pepsis.  It must have been that added lemon that took so long!

After another long stint away from our table, our intrepid waiter returns to take our order.  We can tell he is reasonably new - seemed confused about a few things, but now our order was on it's way.  At this point we had been at the restaurant for 30 minutes!  

We occupied ourselves by watching a table of 4 college guys get drunk.  Fun stuff, uh, yeah not really.  They had just been seated when we got there and their waitress delivered to their table 4 BUCKETS of ice with 6-8 bottles of beer in each bucket.  They proceeded to drink.  Not sure I saw any food.  Their first beer was acknowledged with a toast "To working hard and drinking hard."  After that they didn't toast any more, just downed the beers and got louder and louder.  They took breaks to go out and smoke, cause everyone knows you drink two beers, you must go have a cigarette...

Another table was seated behind us and they the party of 5 students from the college got their food really quickly.  Now maybe it was because they could tell Becky, Georgia and I were now longer college age, that it took so long to get our food.

At one hour into our wait, we started to ask about our food.  When it came the order was not right, but we lived with it and one of Becky's items hadn't been ordered.  Back to the kitchen for the waiter.  Then we had to ask for silverware as the guy who seated us and gave us menus, neglected to give us that important item. 

We found out that they had lost a server the night before and were shorthanded.  Yet it seemed that our waiter was the only one picking up the slack.  The others were not rushing everywhere as he seemed to be.

They took 10% off our bill, and because the manager had trouble with Lindsay's bill, he gave her the whole meal for free. 

Part of the funny stuff was that when some of the party went to the bathroom, a certain person got TP stuck on the bottom of their shoe.  Apparently no amount of scraping the shoe on the floor and snorting, would remove said TP.  Finally, only going outside helped the stuff to get off her shoe.  

Part of the craziness was that Lin and I made a stop at the bathroom I noticed a maybe 7 or 8 year old boy sitting at a table right next to the bar area.  He had a Pepsi and some ice cream.  His parents were at the bar.  This made me very sad.  It made me wonder what his life is like, for this little boy the age of my daughter who was at Grandma and Grandpa, playing wii and watching Toy Story 2....he would be headed home with parents who had been consuming alcohol, at the bar not sitting having dinner with him at the table.

When the girls were talking about how long it took at the restaurant I said "It took so long, that the drunk college boys were sober before we got our food!"  Funny, but sad.

The night got better when we went back downtown and visited Denny.  He was happy to see us, had had a really good night with sales, and was getting ready to close soon.

Emily and Chelsea must still have coffee, so off we went to the Prince Street Cafe, and hip little place across from the Fulton.  We found a few tables, only because it was now after 10:00pm and a few of us got something to drink our style.  I had unsweetened Iced Tea, Lindsay a bottle of Coke, Becky a rootbeer float, and Chelsea got an frozen something that looked really good.  We are big party girls, aren't we?!

Home at almost 11:30pm and quick run to "Camp Geezer" for the little folk, quickly home again...off to dream land for the little folk.

We decided that for the things we'd like to do in the city, we will take one of these lovely upcoming Autumn days, and do lunch and poke around during the day.  

The fun came from being together, and laughing over the craziness. Oh, and Becky has now posted about it so go here for her perspective and photos!