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A Hot Breakfast
By Milt Abel | March 25, 2012
| March 25, 2012My love of Costco is flawed: you have to buy such regrettable vast quantities. You can get a great deal on double-A batteries, but only 48 at a time. I could walk around my house like Johnny Appleseed and drop batteries in every remote and still have a satchel half-full of batteries to cast about. So I need a place to store my reserves. Because of warehouse shopping I need my own warehouse. I may need my own forklift in the future. Not yet, but when I do, hopefully I can buy just one.
Costco and batteries are on my mind because the remote control in my St Louis LaQuinta hotel room didn’t work last night and I had to substitute my own Kirklands (I’ve even got them tucked in my luggage). I carry a few bound with a rubber band for portable electronics when I travel and now they are laying atop the unused of the two queen beds on my room, along with the two dead batteries of a different brand, and I’m ruminating about what to tell the front desk. My faith in human nature has sunk; I fear if I tell them the batteries are dead at this late hour of my stay, they will wonder why I didn’t say something sooner and maybe it’s a ruse to simply reap good batteries for dead, as I go from hotel to hotel. I worry they will suspect this long before believing I had extra batteries with me and used those. Or, would it be less concern to just leave the good batteries in, and eat the expense. Travel is a moral and logistic nightmare.
A good friend and great comic, Gary Mule Deer has a line I’ve loved since the first time I heard it: “La Quinta is an old Mexican word meaning ‘next to Denny’s’.” And look for yourself:
After taking a photo showing the Denny’s and the LaQuinta side-by-side I decided to go back and get someone to snap one with me in the picture. If you look hard on the photo on the left there are people in that blue sedan in the foreground. I had asked the driver to get out and grab a picture of me but he failed to catch the Denny’s sign. Before he got out of his car he put his near-empty Corona beer bottle down in the driver’s footwell and told the other two ladies in the car, everyone dressed for church though it was a Saturday morning and probably in their late forties, that he’d be right back. Drinking in the parking lot of a Denny’s at 10AM on a Saturday morning, is there a better way to begin a weekend of regret?
A couple hours before this photo I had passed on the free continental breakfast at LaQuinta for something more substantial at this Denny’s next door. Adding ‘continental’ to anything implies an upgrade of sorts, except in the arena of hotel lobby free breakfasts, then I think pasty pastries and Fruit Loops spilling from hoppers into Styrofoam bowls.
At Denny’s I got the FitFare Veggie Skillet and was embarrassed for the first five minutes it sat at my table. They served it like fajitas, in a black cast-iron skillet that was so hot the veggies sizzled and popped and steamed so loudly and profusely, if I was a cat I would have skittered away. It was too loud, too active; I felt I was in danger being so close to it. I tried pushing the vegetables around to get everything to cool off but it just exposed new items to being vaporized. If there were safety goggles I would have put them on. And it just didn’t stop. Everyone around me was trying not to look, but how could they not? They, with their traditionally quiet pancakes, and me with my volcano. And I kept wondering how long would it take to stop drawing attention, when it would be safe to approach to eat? What was the half-life of a FitFare Veggie Skillet?
It was good when I eventually got to it. Filling. Maybe too much so. When I got back to my room I managed to put too much demand on the plumbing and wrote a note with from the little scribble pads they keep near the phone. ‘Clogged’ and set it on the closed lid, then got prolific and wrote ‘dead batteries’ for a note set next to the opened remote with its batteries (not mine) still on the bed. The notes had to be irksome, and probably kept the room attendant from replacing the notepad. I always take those.
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