9:30 F@#%*&ING RANT

EVERYTHING out here closes by 10 PM. Maybe not everything but MOST everything. I just got back from trying to get some late dinner and the family restaurant that is open til 10 closed at 9. Who knows why. So I made it to a Subway nearby which closed at 9:30, cool except it was out of the meat AND the bread I wanted. There is a Subway with a DRIVE-THRU that's open "late" or so I'm told and it was close by too. So I get there, the kids inside clearly do not want to wait on me cause it's late and they are cleaning up blah blah. It's 9:14 and the drive up is open til 10 pm, which is NOT late. Um hello? So I get my subway and go home.

So there is ONE 24 hour restaurant but it's what you'd expect from a 24 hour pace in that it's noisy and busy at night with young folks who have nothing to do and it has a wide variety of food choices. More importantly the one time I was there it didn't seem dirty but I didn't get an impression of cleanliness either. I haven't eaten there since even though the food was good.

Food is important to me and since I choose not to cook, I need to eat out a lot. It's not like I have a live in chef like some other relative who lives far away. So perhaps I don't need a gourmet chef but if I left the cooking to other people who live in my house like my mother, we'd be eating ground beef and pork a lot. I tend toward chicken. Occasionally a nice piece of steak but my meat of choice is chicken.

The husband is not allowed to cook having once made cinnamon flavored rice to add to the beef stew I had made earlier. Let's just say that I didn't know there was cinnamon in the rice until after I put the spoonful of rice and stew in my mouth. Don't try this at home, really.

Back to the rant. The point is that I have to drive at least 15 miles to place I like to eat. These are the same places that I could get to easily when I live in the city of Chicago. I love Flat Top. It's 18 miles away now that the new one opened. 24 miles before that. There are no interesting restaurants nearby. There is little variety. I can't go to my local Filipino restaurant because there isn't one. I can't get Indian food. Ethnic food is sorely lacking out here with the exception of Mexican food. I can get that, plenty of it, and it's very good. One plus.

I like space in the new house. Isn't it cute?

It looks exactly like this too, colors and all. One day maybe I will take pics of the inside and let you see how I decorate. I think I do a nice job. It's not everyone's taste but I like it. I digress....

I love my deck and my bucolic setting. I am still a city girl at heart and at least once every few months I start to wonder why I moved out this way. I know in a few years there will be a lot of shopping and eating option nearby and construction on at least 2 of them has already begun. But my problem is I want stuff now. I don't know how long I can do this. I wonder if in 5years I'll be going back to the city? All this doubt and anguish because I couldn't find dinner at 9pm. *sigh*.

Legal issues to follow. If I can copy a pic off the web to my pc then is it OK to use it in my blog here? I already did but just checking. Yesterday when I talked about the mole on Amada, I did have a picture of her but then I wondered if I pulled a pic of her off the web if I'd be violating something. Worse since I said she looked like a witch I wondered if my opinion of her looking like a witch was opening me up to liability, or even more so if I put her face to the name of Amanda something. Oh well.