Author: F C

I want to wish you all a happy, safe, and blessed Christmas. Thanks so much for the cards and emails! If you are reading this, you’re really die-hard, or really curious. I really appreciate it. I’ll work on my customary end of the year message later on today.

I’ve been kind of bummed out because one of my co-workers in another department died in a bus accident during the holiday. The funeral is tomorrow, and it looks like I’m not going to be able to go because it is so far away, and I’m covering for three other people at work. It’s one of those terribly improbable things – she came and visited my office on Friday before she left for vacation. Anyway, as said in Hill Street Blues, “let’s all be careful out there.”

Thinking about the shrimp tortillas that I had yesterday ….. tempura battered jumbo peeled and cleaned shrimp that’s such a delicious cross-cultural metaphor. As confirmed by my co-worker, there’s no such thing as a shrimp tortilla in Mexico. If you ever look closely enough, you have to realize that most of the fresh taco places, including this one, are actually run by Chinese. Some of them look and dress ambiguously enough that you aren’t sure until they call out their orders to the kitchen.

I had gone earlier in the week to pick up some other stuff for the office luncheon and realized that they are doing gangbuster business. They got the Mexican food, they do Chinese food, and they do fried chicken, and people in the neighborhood can’t get enough of it. The thing that is really bizzare is that, two doors down, there is an authentic Chino-Latino place (with real Chinese from South America that speak fluent Spanish) that’s been there since the ’70s, and they’re getting creamed by these guys that probably never set foot in Mexico. Talk about mindblowing!

While in the process of cleaning up my apartment, I collected coins that fell out of pockets and onto the floor. Commerce Bank has a neat coin counting machine called the “Penny Arcade”. You dump the coins into the machine, the machine counts the coins and gives you a receipt, and you just go to the teller to collect fresh green bills. The really neat thing is that unlike CoinStar, which does the same thing at supermarkets, Commerce Bank does not take any commission for the service. There is also a guessing game — you get a free prize if you guess within $1.99 of the counted amount. I guessed $35, but it turned out to be $51.47 — what a find!