On the menu

At the Half-Moon in Kennett I usually order a buffalo burger, but while I was scanning the menu the other night the buffalo short-rib sandwich caught my eye.
"That's my father's favorite!" commented our waitress.
I agree with her father; it was just delicious. It came with caramelized onions and a hint of horseradish cream, and the bread was focaccia. Another winner from the Half-Moon's kitchen!

Phlebotomy

First thing this morning I went for my yearly routine lab tests at the Quest Diagnostics lab in the little shopping center to the east of the Kennett Wal-Mart. Because some of the "normal" values they compare your numbers to are calculated based on fasting levels, you're not supposed to eat breakfast before you go in. So I didn't and I was really missing my bowl of cereal, having had only a salad for dinner some 14 hours earlier.
So what was the first thing the lab tech said to me?
"Wow, is my stomach rumbling! I only had a bagel for breakfast."
I burst out laughing.
"Uh, guess what: you're not gonna get any sympathy from me," I said.
She realized that hadn't been the most tactful remark, and she chuckled and apologized.
But what's impressive is that during this conversation, she'd already poked my arm without hurting me one bit and extracted the two vials needed. Honestly, I barely noticed.

Suspicious activity

I've been working with this one client for probably 15 years. He retired as the president of a major publishing house, got bored without a challenge and started his own software firm. He is a larger-than-life character, both figuratively and literally, and over the past few weeks we've been struggling to straighten out a particularly bug-prone content-management program.
So this morning I was surprised when he called me and started chortling rather than wailing about what new software problems had surfaced overnight with our colleagues in India.
It seems he'd just received a call from one of his credit-card companies saying someone had used his credit-card number to make some kind of nutritional purchase from a body-building website.
Instead of being outraged, he thought this was hilarious. He took a look at the website, roared with laughter and told the credit-card rep, "Are you kidding me? I couldn't look like that even if I had extensive plastic surgery!"
He offered to send a photo of himself if she needed proof.
She said no, that wasn't necessary. He wouldn't be billed for it.

Forgive any typos

I've been getting some very peculiar text messages from a friend's iPhone recently. In one she mentioned that her "blackfish" was coming later in the week, and in another she told me she was trying to track down information about an injured rider via the local "goodness wireless."
I thought that perhaps "Blackfish" was some kind of a code-named writing project; "goodness wireless" I couldn't make any sense of.
But at lunch today we figured out what was going on. Her iPhone was on auto-correct: she had meant to type "blacksmith" and "hoofbeat wireless" (her term for the local equestrian grapevine).
When we stopped laughing, she fetched the offending smart phone and reprogrammed it to stop auto-correcting. Shame; I'll miss these baffling texts.

Angels of the first degree

Tilda's Customer Service Award of the Month goes to the outpatient registration folks at Jennersville Hospital.

I went in for my yearly mammogram first thing in the morning (yes, I cluster all of my routine medical appointments into one week) and, naturally, left the prescription hanging on the fridge at home. I thought, yikes, I'll have to drive all the way back home, I'll be late for my appointment and then for the board meeting right after that ...

Nope. The wonderful woman behind the desk simply called my doctor's office and they faxed over the script immediately (lots of thanks to them, too!). I got the test done and was out of there by 8:25 a.m.

"Impressive" doesn't begin to describe it.

Stink bug update

So where are they?
Entomological prognosticators advised us that in mid-September the stink bugs would invade our houses again, in even larger numbers than before. But so far that just hasn't happened. I've had two bad days when there were dozens of the disgusting pests on the walls and windows, but since then, maybe -- MAYBE -- only a couple a day.
One theory proposes that the heavy rain we've had in recent weeks has slowed them down. Or maybe they're just waiting until it gets colder outside.
But I've got my defenses all ready. I bought special lighted traps that a high-school friend of mine designed; I want to try Hal Lewis's "death on a stick" sticky device (it's like a Swiffer with a sticky pad on the mop end); and a friend of a friend wants me to try out a prototype of his trap.
And I've heard that those old-fashioned fly-paper spirals work too.

Telephone

We have to listen to so many inane, high-volume cell-phone conversations -- for instance, the other day at the supermarket a woman was standing in front of the ice-cream section, with the freezer door wide open, yacking about what kind of ice cream to buy. Imagine, then, my luck at overhearing two fascinating ones at the Kennett Y this weekend!
The first was a doctor answering a page. He was pacing up and down the corridor, so I didn't get the full conversation, but I heard "renal insufficiency" and "infection" and "trach tube." With that calm, decisive authority that doctors project, he reassured the nurse on the other end of the line that the patient was OK, although "we'll take a look at him tomorrow."
The second was a Unionville girl planning her Homecoming weekend. She had all the facts at her fingertips: where her friends lived, who was picking them up, what their curfews were, who didn't want to ride in the same car with whom. I was impressed with her organizational skills and envious of her youthful stamina: it sounded like her weekend was a wall-to-wall lineup of sports, parties, dates, and movies.