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outlasting Taco Bell
Friday, December 2 2011
location: "Creekside Doublewide," Stingy Hollow Road, south of Staunton, Augusta County, Virginia
I guess I drank enough last night that I actually had some hangover-type problems today, though they were all localized to my stomach (IPA hangovers, by contrast, center in my brain). This made me suspect that perhaps the problem was drinking all that orange juice (vodka-spiked or otherwise) shortly before going to bed.
Gretchen had done some research and found that the cheapest way to replace the Eleanor-damaged windshield of our Civic Hybrid would be to have it done in Virginia by a company called Safelite. For only $25 extra, they'd come out and do it in the driveway. I'd called to see if they'd do it in Staunton, but when I was told that the nearest place to drive to was in Charlottesville, I elected to have a technician come out. He arrived late this morning in his Safelite van whose windshield, ironically enough, had an unfixed crack of its own. "I don't have time to fix mine," said the charmingly-squirrely technician Chris Michæls, who also happened to be missing the last joint on his right thumb. He did a good job, taking only about a half hour to give me a window indistinguishable from a brand new one. He even managed to transfer the rearview mirror, EZ-Pass, and all the stickers that make the vehicle legal to drive in the State of New York.
I went into town to run some errands, starting with Staples, where I returned a card reader I'd bought yesterday (having forgotten that my mother has a card reader). That plaza where the Staples is also is home to a Kroger (where I did some shopping), a Verizon store, a Chinese buffet restaurant, and a Taco Bell. It's not the most depressing plaza in the world or even in Staunton, but something about the Taco Bell sign made me momentarily sad. The feeling I had was that it was a cosmic injustice that my father hadn't been about to outlast Taco Bell.
I made a little change in my usual town routine, opting to go to Baja Bean instead of coffee shop and to drink IPAs instead of coffee. As I would in on coffee shop, though, I sat by myself and puttered away at my laptop. I also ordered some food: a plate of jalapeño fries with a vegan alternative (diablo sauce) to the usual dairy-based dipping sauce. That place is a good alternative to a coffee shop, but spending time there cost me about four times as much. It was worth it, though, to learn of another excellent IPA, DuganA. It's an order of magnitude better than , which was the other beer I had there.
Back at Creekside, I made an enormous pot of chili using tempeh as a meat substitute and a somewhat too-large can of hominy. Also, I realized that the container I'd thought was full of salt is actually full of sugar.
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