A Good Restaurant and A Bad Talk

But first, the beautiful little roses growing on the fence - forgot what their official name is...anyone?


There's a little Mediterranean restaurant nearby that doesn't seem to do any business, and we blame the location, because EVERY restaurant that's ever been there has closed within a year or two. Surprisingly, they were advertising for help, and Drew's now officially finished with high school, so we ate dinner there just to check out the working conditions before he applies. Here's the hummus, which was really runny, oddly, but had the best flavor - even better than our usual hummus joint.


And here's my chicken curry, which was very tasty...


and Lucas's softshell crab - also yummy. I didn't get a picture of the best dish, which was Drew's lamb with cranberries, mushrooms, and balsamic vinegar sauce - that stuff was fantastic!


We were the only table for about 20 minutes, which was quite awkward, but then 2 other tables came in to save us. Now they had bottles of wine on display on a table, but no wine list, and my Mom and I were up for a glass. You should consider the volume of business when ordering a glass of wine, and I was worried that it might have turned if it had been sitting a while, so I ordered a whole bottle, since it's legal to leave with a corked, bagged bottle here (according to Carrabbas). Now the poor waitress looked about 18 years old, and went to get a Chardonnay off the display table before I realized there was not apparently not a wine chiller (don't I sound snobby about chilled wine!), but Mom said she could drink room temperature wine, so I went with it. Sadly, the smell hit me before the taste did, and let's just say we didn't drink much of it. I even rushed to get in the car when we left, lest the owner chase me down with my "forgotten" bottle! I just googled Oak Leaf Chardonnay, and apparently you can get it for $1.97 at Walmart. I was thinking how affordable it was at the restaurant, but I see now that he did mark it up to $13. Sheesh, you get what you pay for.

Okay, on to the talk. I was asked to present a lecture to a conference here in town, and they implied they wanted one I had just given to another group, so that's a piece of cake, right? I agreed, but then the official letter said they wanted the focus to be slightly different, and I found out while doing the research that it didn't actually pertain to the heart at all. I was very bummed and had a hard time starting to work on it, and I've been dreading it for WEEKS! So Wednesday I get an email with the whole conference listed, and the woman in front of me is speaking about a broader version of the SAME topic. She was furious that the organizer didn't tell either one of us about the overlap, and fully 50% of her talk dealt with my subject. Now if you're a teacher or a lecturer or something, has this ever happened to you? Would you believe that she and I even used the SAME Powerpoint slide theme?! We had slides of the same 3 studies with the very same graphs, and I spent a lot of time saying, "As Dr. Serious mentioned...."

The saving grace (if you could call it that) was that she used much bigger scientific words and got down on a molecular level, whereas I kept it on a more lay-personable level (you can use that - I just made it up). The biggest words I used, in fact, were "microvascular obstruction," and my Mad Cow nearly screwed those up! Note to self: always ask for everyone's topics when presenting at a big conference.