It used to be that Bennigans was one of my favorite places to go eat. It comes from eating there for lunch every Saturday when I was growing up. Since then, though, I’ve noticed more and more Bennigans restaurants annoying the hell out of me, and even the ones I thought were decent are going downhill.

The three closest Bennigans restaurants to my house are the one at FM 1960 and I-45, the one at FM 1960 and Veterans Memorial, and the one at Willowbrook Mall. The one at Veterans Memorial has gotten pretty scuzzy over the years, and the last few times we went to the I-45 one, we’ve gotten rotten service. Sean has confirmed recently that the latter one has not been any better as of late. We went to the Willowbrook one on Saturday, and not only did my burger come out wrong, they only had cinnamon ice cream to go with the brownie bottom pie. (Yes, it tastes as bad as it sounds.) However, I had been telling my father recently that the one by my office (located on 610 by Buffalo Speedway) was pretty good to us. That all fell apart today.

I went to lunch there with my coworkers Cherry, Lettye, and Ruth. When we got there, we were told they had a new lunch promotion where certain menu items plus a soft drink were $4.99. We all ordered items off the lunch promotion, which were all standard Bennigans fare. From there, we waited… and waited… and waited…

After a while we started noticing that people who had been seated well before us were getting their food. At one point, Cherry stopped the waitress and asked why our food was taking so long. The waitress replied with a half-hearted, “Well, we do have a new menu…” I looked up at her, and said, “The stuff we ordered wasn’t.” She walked off, and at that point I realized that wasn’t the comeback I should have used. What I SHOULD have pointed out was that the menu was not changed at all. The only thing that had changed was the lunch promotion.

Anyway, a few minutes later, a table behind us got their food, and we had had enough. We stopped their waiter, and asked him to find out where our food was and to get the manager. Very shortly, the manager walked out with our food. The food was lukewarm, and both my meal and Cherry’s was served incorrectly. (I had asked the dressing in my salad to be pre-mixed in, and Cherry wanted mayo instead of honey mustard on her sandwich.) What angered us most, though, was the manager’s reaction to it all. Cherry was livid and demanded to know why the food was so late out and what he was going to do to remedy the problem. The manager gave a dumb smile and nodded; in essence, he acted as if he didn’t understand a word Cherry was saying. I almost did a Chris Tucker impression and asked, “Do you understand the words coming out of her mouth?”

FINALLY, the waitress brought the checks around… and the manager had only taken $1 off the meal for each person. Granted, it was $5 to begin with, but still, it almost seemed like an insult. We were already late, so Cherry and I put $5 in cash in each, and I lent Ruth and Lettye $5 each so they didn’t have to pay by debit/credit card and cause an even longer wait.

We used to go to that Bennigans just about weekly, ever since the corporate office moved into our building… and even then some of us went regularly before. No more. The staff’s unapologetic attitude basically guaranteed we will not be going back there for a good long while. That’s another Bennigans “lost” to us, which is a shame considering they used to be very good and quick. Now all I have left so far that I would go to are the Galleria and the 290 ones.

I hope it doesn’t happen, but in the meantime, we’ll see how long it takes for either of them to piss me off.

Bleh. I could do with another day or two in this weekend.

It’s not as if I’ve been especially busy, per se. I’ve done quite a bit of resting this weekend, but with a potentially very busy week coming up, I could have done with a day or two more to rest. The big thing that comes to mind is the fact that we have a visitor coming to the office tomorrow morning. I have an idea who it is, but I could very easily be wrong. Still, it’s important enough where I need to be at the office all day tomorrow.

The weekend started with a bit of an annoyance, though. On Friday evening, Mom was commenting that she was getting a terrible signal on her satellite receiver. I didn’t notice any problems on mine, so I put it down to her receiver being weird. Then, Saturday morning, my own receiver started having issues while I was trying to watch Transformers: Animated. Dad noticed issues on the receiver downstairs too, which led us to believe that it was either the dish itself or the LNB splitter device we were using to get four outputs out of our dual-LNB dish. Dad thought it was the splitter, while I thought it might have been the dish being out of alignment. Well… it turned out we were both wrong. Dad had gone outside to look at the dish, and noticed that an ash tree’s branch was wafting right in front of the dish. THAT was what was causing the signal interference. Once Dad amputated it, the satellite signal came through loud and clear. I’m just thankful that the interference didn’t manifest while my DVR was recording Battlestar Galactica Friday night…

Saturday afternoon was a bit busy, too, as we all headed to Willowbrook Mall so Dad could get some shirts. I was slightly amused as we went into Macy’s, as we were confronted by an iPod vending machine upon entering. :-) Mom and Dad weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Neither Penney nor Macy’s had what Dad was after, so we wandered down to Sears. Along the way, I noticed to my utter lack of surprise that an Apple Store was on the verge of opening at the mall. On the other hand, I also noticed that the Sharper Image there was having a store closing sale. In retrospect, I should have gone in to see if they had any of those free weights you fill with water when traveling. While Mom and Dad were in Sears, I went ahead and bought a new audio cable for my iPod and car stereo from Radio Shack. After Dad struck out at Sears, he gave up and we went and had my splurge meal at Bennigans. All I have to say about that meal is this: cinnamon ice cream does NOT work with a brownie bottom pie.

As far as today goes, I haven’t done much other than upgrade this site to WordPress 2.5, and also work on getting some more of my movies in iTunes/iPod format for when my new iPod arrives. I even got to spend some time out in the backyard relaxing and watching the dogs play. It’s been a quiet day, for the most part.

In any event, like I said, I do have a busy week ahead of me. I’m thinking I’ll get a refill of my water, check on any remaining issues around, and then head to bed. I want to be at the office nice and early just in case. Ah, well… we’ll see how things go. :-)

Series four of Doctor Who premiered a week ago yesterday. The one thing I was worried about was the fact that the scheduled companion was Donna Noble. Donna Noble was last seen as the title character in “The Runaway Bride”, and to be honest… her character made the episode almost unwatchable. She was shrill, dense, selfish, and almost unlikeable. My friends Jeff and Malinda have since said they can’t even re-watch the episode. So, needless to say, when Donna was announced as a full-time companion, I was rather disappointed and apprehensive.

Or, as Jenn so appropriately put it, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Anyway, we’ve now seen two episodes with Donna, and I have to say… I’m relatively impressed.

I guess Russell T. Davies realized how unpopular she was as she was first portrayed. She’s still a bit shrill sometimes, but it’s obvious that within the story, she’s a lot less clueless and a lot less self-centered. It’s obvious her brief time with the Doctor changed her for the better. However, what impressed me most was a scene at the end of the second story. I realize this is a spoiler, and I do apologize, but when I saw Donna in “The Runaway Bride”, I would NEVER have imagined her in tears, begging the Doctor to save somebody, ANYBODY. She did in this story, and in my mind it redeemed her for her debut episode.

There’s still eleven episodes left in the season, so things can definitely change. In the meantime, though, the season’s off to a much better start than I had anticipated.

You can thank Ginny for pointing out this video to me… :-)

Happy birthday, hon… hope it’s going well for you, and looking forward to celebrating many more with you. :-)

Well, it’s a Sunday night, and I’m just sitting here talking to Misty and watching some Cops. I’m also tired as hell for some reason, but I’m willing to bet that might be because I still haven’t fully recovered from the late night Friday. I can’t say I’m entirely ready for work tomorrow, but I’ll have to manage regardless.

I had to go out to our Oklahoma City branch this past week because we were cutting the network uplink for our branch there over from a VPN over DSL to a dedicated point-to-point T1 line. I also planned on reloading a PC there, but I later learned that wasn’t going to be advisable. I arrived in Oklahoma City at around 4 PM; the flight itself was uneventful except for a turbulent landing, but I WAS annoyed at IAH by a TSA employee who wasn’t too willing to deal with the fact that my boarding pass was on my cell phone. I arrived in Norman at around 5:30, got to my hotel room, and did a bit of work before going over to Saltgrass for supper.

Thursday was fun; after work, I got ahold of Jeff and Malinda, and Jeff came by to pick me up from the hotel. From there, we went to their brand new house. I have to admit the house is damn nice, and they got it at a steal, seeing as the previous owner didn’t take good care of it. They have a pretty large living room, and their backyard even has a fish pond. :-) Malinda cooked some homemade lasagna for dinner, which she made with spicy sausage instead of regular sausage. To the surprise of myself and Jeff, it was damn delicious and probably the best lasagna I’ve had in a LONG while. After supper, we sat down and watched the latest episode of Torchwood, and from there Jeff and Malinda took me back to the hotel.

After I got finished with work on Friday, Jeff and Malinda picked me up from the hotel, and we went over to Ted’s to pick up dinner. Once we picked up dinner, we went back to their house to eat. After eating, Malinda started setting up the table to play the board game of the night: Arkham Horror. Once Karen (Jeff and Malinda’s friend/honorary little sister) arrived, we sat down and begin playing.

Arkham Horror is a board game that is based on the Cthulhu Mythos. The game is the first one I’ve ever played where it’s all players working together against the game itself. The players play as investigators in the fictional town of Arkham in the early 1920’s; the object of the game is to pass through and seal the otherworldly gates that keep appearing in the town, while dealing with random events and battling/avoiding monsters that come through the gates. If too many gates open, an Old One manifests on Earth and the game goes into sudden death (kind of fitting) where the players have a very very very slim chance to defeat or be devoured. The running mood of the game seemed to be best described by two recurring comments during the night: “oh FUCK” and “we are so screwed”. The low point was when Jeff’s character was in another world, and he drew an encounter card he had never seen before. As I watched, his face fell into an expression of shock. His character had to fight a DIFFERENT Old One, Shub-Niggurath, on his own. He barely got around it. In the end, we were almost ready to enter and seal the final gate when a badly drawn card caused Nyarlathotep to materialize on Earth, and despite our best efforts it defeated us. We may have lost, but it was a damn fun game. From there Jeff and Malinda took me back to the hotel, where I made my farewells.

Saturday was busy as hell. I got to the airport at 10 AM, which was well before my noon flight. In fact, I got there right before they boarded the 10:20 AM flight to Houston. As I watched, they had everyone board the flight. Then, after a couple of minutes, they got on the airport loudspeakers and asked for a certain passenger to come to the gate and board ASAP. A few minutes later they made the announcement again. After a bit, they gave the seat to a standby passenger, closed the plane door, and the jetway moved away from the flight. The plane sat there for a few minutes more, as the pilots presumably did the pre-flight check. At this point, the woman who the gate personnel had been calling for arrived at the gate, and was absolutely incensed that they would not let her board the gate. (“If we let you board it would delay the flight.” “THE PLANE’S STILL SITTING THERE!”) I was a bit amused, because the gate people had been diligent in looking for her, and she should have been there at the appropriate time.

I wish I could have gone home as soon as I got to Houston. Instead I had to drive to the office and pick up backup tapes and a couple of handheld barcode scanners. From there, I went to the datacenter and swapped out backup tapes. After I was done there, I had to go to the Creekmont facility to assist in the final steps in putting them on our ERP software. When I was done there (at around 6:30 PM), I decided to go straight home. Brent and Vada invited me to go to a comedy club with them, but I was tired and just wanted to go home.

Today was uneventful, except for this morning. After I got up, before having breakfast or anything, I decided to weigh myself. I have no idea how (especially as I didn’t exercise and wasn’t as good as I should have been eating-wise while I was gone), but I lost three pounds this past week. I’ll probably exercise in about thirty minutes to make up for not having done so yesterday, but still… nice to know that I didn’t lose any progress in my weight-loss quest.

As for the rest of this week, I don’t really know what I have planned other than doing work at Creekmont and also doing a bit of work at the corporate office in the morning. I might end up doing something with Brent later this week, but nothing’s decided yet. Ah, well… I’ll just take it as it all comes. :-)

I think my coworker Cherry now has carte blanche to say, “I told you so.”

This morning, after I got up from bed and started going downstairs for breakfast, Mom caught up with me on the stairs and said, “Let me get ahead of you. I want to show you something.” That’s never a good sign, but I let her pass me and we headed downstairs, and we went past the gate at the bottom of the stairs and went to the gate at the entrance to the kitchen.

Before I continue, I should explain the gates to those who haven’t heard me mention them before. When we got Star back in 2004, we didn’t realize at the time that she was not cat-friendly. As a result, we ended up putting child gates at the entrances to the kitchen and at the bottom of the stairs so that she couldn’t get upstairs and harm or kill Gus and Ringo. The gates have been pretty effective in maintaining order.

Anyway, Mom and I get to the entrance to the kitchen, and we saw Taz laying on Chase’s bed. Upon seeing us, Taz and Star both got up from where they were resting and came to the gate, with both standing up and putting their front paws on the top of it. Mom frowned and said, “I guess she’s not going to do it this time…”

At that point, Taz steeled herself and jumped over the gate to us.

Mom then opened the gate and ushered Taz back in. I asked Mom if she had done it before this morning, and she said that she had done it last night as well. In fact, Mom was surprised this morning because she had expected to see Taz in the living room. Instead, she was in the kitchen quietly laying down, but as soon as she saw Mom she leapt over the fence to be with her.

The funny thing is, Cherry had said this would probably happen when I first told her about Taz. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when I tell her about what happened. The only worry I have now is whether she’s going to pull the same stunt to get past the fence at the bottom of the stairs…

I originally saw this posted over on Jenn’s LiveJournal, where she put the subject line as, “For people who like the 80s, or like logo design. It’s orgasmic if you love both.” It’s a music video by a band called Justice, for a song called “DVNO”. I figure that at the very least, Louie will get a kick out of it; he loves collecting bumpers, and this is made up entirely of parodies/homages of 80’s logos and bumpers. :-)

This is weird. My employer gives us Good Friday off. I admit, I’m thankful for the three-day weekend. However, it seems like of all of my friends, I’m the only one who gets today off. (Those teacher friends who have Spring Break this week don’t count.) Even Misty, who works for the state of Mississippi, doesn’t get today off. So, while everyone else gets to work today, I got to sleep in and not worry too much about work. Just in case, though, I have my work laptop up and running in case I DO need to log in remotely and fix something.

On a brighter note, I did weigh myself this morning. For some reason I was worried I wouldn’t have lost any weight. I certainly didn’t feel like I had. In retrospect I shouldn’t have been worried, especially as I had to miss lunch Wednesday and I had been good about what I ate otherwise. I lost four pounds this past week. In total, I’ve lost 13 pounds. I think I’m doing well. :-)

I don’t really have much planned for this weekend, either. In about an hour or so, I’ll be going with Dad to DSW to get new shoes for work, and then Dad wants to go into Hobby Lobby. Mom’s working today, so we’ll go to the Red Robin by her office for my splurge meal. I’ll take the rest of the weekend as it comes, though I will probably wash my car tomorrow as it’s still covered in mud from the rain storms earlier this week.

Ah, well… for now, though, I’m going to just relax and enjoy not having to do anything for a while. This should be a good weekend. :-)

Well, I went ahead and weighed myself yesterday morning.

Before I continue, I should mention that I wasn’t expecting to lose weight this week, really. I had gone to Cheesecake Factory on Wednesday with my boss Scot, and Thursday night I went and had sushi with Brent. Though, when I ordered at Cheesecake Factory, Scot was a bit surprised when I ordered a Miller Lite instead of a Shiner Bock. Then, when it came time to order the actual entree, he expected me to order my usual double barbecue bacon cheeseburger. Instead, to his greater surprise, I ordered a barbecue ranch chicken salad. He gave me a weird look when the waiter left, and I replied, “Dude, I AM on a diet…” On the other hand, at Tosa Thursday night, I ordered enough sushi where Brent laughed and said, “Hey, I thought you were on a diet…”

According to the scale, I lost three pounds. In other words, my overall change is that I’m down nine pounds.

My coworkers Lettye and Cherry have been noticing the change in me, especially as I’ve not been at the office too much the past couple of weeks. Yesterday, I made my first observation as to my weight loss; normally my Bluetooth earpiece’s microphone rests against my cheek. Yesterday I noticed it no longer did so. So, there is a difference so far… I’m looking forward to the bigger signs of slimming down. :-)

On another front, it looks like Taz is here to stay. Mom took her to the vet on Tuesday to have her checked over. While there, we found even more evidence she was abandoned. What we had thought was a collar was in fact a portion of leash tied around her neck. According to the vet she’s in good health, and approximately one to two years old. She’s also not spayed yet, which will be taken care of in a couple of weeks.

She’s been a real handful. She’s still in the very needy stage, which means she takes every opportunity to jump up at us. Normally we’d tell her “no”, and pull her off. The problem, though, is that she is EXTREMELY strong for her size and it takes quite a bit of effort to pull her off. Also, when I got up this morning and made my way downstairs, I entered the kitchen to see Dad working on putting what was left of Chase’s bed into a trash bag. Apparently Taz had destroyed it during the night. He was NOT a happy camper.

Taz and Gus finally realized each other existed last night. I heard Taz going berzerk barking, with Star joining in. I left my room and went downstairs to check on what was going on. From what I could tell, Gus had started being vocal and Taz realized there was someone up there. :-) Gus obviously didn’t miss the fact that there was a new bark, as well… heh.

Anyway, I don’t have too much planned for the rest of this weekend. I’ll likely go to the mall tomorrow to buy a couple of things, and then hit Baker St. for my splurge meal. Otherwise, I don’t think I have too much planned. Also, this coming week is a short week (we get Good Friday off), so that’s always welcome. Ah, well…

For now, though, I’m just going to finish this bottle of water and wait a bit before going to do my aerobic exercise. Fun fun…