It’s Monday, November 30, 2009 and I are sad.
Yesterday, at 5:01 PM, the general big game season for Montana came to a close. I still had one more tag to fill, but I have zero room to complain. Our freezers are packed full and 2009 was a pretty amazing year for me where hunting is concerned. Still, I’m sad that it’s over.
131 days until spring turkey season!
In other news, I don’t know what it is about Nancy Pelosi that makes her incapable of uttering a single syllable without my blood pressure going up 10 points. I have a low tolerance for idiots anyway, but for the love of Pete, she’s a congress woman and Speaker of the [expletive deleted] House to boot. How can she be this much of an idiot?
In discussing the war in Afghanistan, Speaker Pelosi quipped “Can we afford this war?”
I mean come on! Can we NOT afford it? Exactly how disconnected from reality is this woman? This is the Taliban and Al Qaeda we’re killing here. This isn’t a matter what we can and can’t afford. This NEEDS to be done to ensure our very survival. Failure to utterly eradicate this foe will ONLY serve to encourage more attacks.
I don’t know where Ms Pelosi was on September 11th, but it must have been someplace far, far from the land where I do dwell. We’re talking about people willing to fly airplanes into our buildings and murder people by the thousands. These people are a danger unlike any we’ve faced before and we owe it to ourselves and our children and their children to exterminate Al Qaeda and the Taliban like so much vermin.
This is a much more pressing need than this Quixotic quest to “reform” healthcare. Failure to “reform healthcare” won’t result in a terrorist attack that will kill another 3,000 people, but failure to wipe out the people we’re killing in Afghanistan most certainly will.
I honestly don’t understand how this twit got elected and reelected enough to the point that she’s running our congress. Like Barney Frank’s her district must be chock full o’ great outdoorsmen.
Merry Christmas, Nancy:
But that’s enough about that. It’s Monday and time for
Saturday, the wife and I as well as our son went to Red Lobster. Now, I only go to Red Lobster when driven there by desperation for sea food. Living in Billings, Montana does have its advantages, but access to fresh sea food isn’t one of them. Since we can’t get fresh (as in it’s not been dead very long) sea food here, no one seems to know how to prepare it. It’s been my experience that Red Lobster gets it right about half the time. They did not get it right Saturday.
All I wanted was some king crab. More specifically, I wanted king crab that I did not have to prepare myself.
So I ordered the king crab. My son ordered the snow crab. We’ll get to this later.
All in all, I’m sure our server (Brad) meant well, but I found his efforts to be somewhat below standard. For starts, our appetizer and salads arrived at the same time. This is NO. This is lazy and says that Brad is either clueless or doesn’t give a damn about our dining experience. He’s probably clueless. Most of the urban hillbillies in this town couldn’t tell a salad fork from a bottle opener, so it’s entirely likely that the wait staff at Red Lobster doesn’t know when to bring the appetizer.
The appetizer was good though. It was a grilled shrimp in a jalapeño-mango sauce that did get right the proper blend of sweat and spicy. The cook did well on these as well as with the wife’s order of coconut shrimp.
Now to the fail part. Crab legs, king or snow, are supposed to break at the joints when bent to about a 90 degree angle. If you can fold it in half at a joint, it has ben overcooked or cooked TOO FAST! Again, with Billings being largely populated by people who don’t know squat about sea food, this is acceptable fair.
But to someone who loves crab, it is not. If you’re going to overcook my crab, then at least have the decency to score it. It looks like someone tried, but this appears to have consisted of merely stabbing them in a few places.
For the service part, Brad gets low marks. As before, the appetizer and salads arrived together and despite his promise, the biscuits had an absence of presence until my son stopped Brad on his way by to mention it. The crab legs came with about a thimbleful of drawn butter, of which I ran out and had to stop Brad to get more. This is tricky in that sending out a large vessel of butter allows it to get cold. The better joints will send out a vessel of butter initially and then replenish it about halfway through the meal. This of course requires an attentive waiter, which sadly, Brad was not.
The wife also ran out of sauce for her shrimp and had to stop him to get more, and the most damming evidence was that my tea glass got empty, not once, but twice. An attentive waiter never lets this happen. To my recollection, Brad checked on us once and the rest of the time had to be stopped on his way to somewhere else.
Brad got the standard tip. The service was not stellar, but normal for a chain restaurant, in Billings, Montana. Chain restaurants get some slack from me because they’re just that, a chain. The “owner” really doesn’t have his/her neck out on the block like a sole proprietor, so expecting the same quality of food and service is a bit much. Plus, Billings people just seem to tolerate bad service.
Suffice it to say that it will be a long, long time before we go back. They’re not under embargo or anything so go there knowing what to expect. They’re just not getting high marks from me for anything this trip.