Dinner

Last night neither Mel nor I felt like cooking dinner. Besides, there wasn’t really anything in the house to eat except for some cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup. We decided to go out to dinner before buying groceries for the week. We ended up going to Carlos O’Kelly’s in Marion. We were seated immediately, but as soon as we were seated I was wondering how our dining environment would be. As we approached the table, there were two girls – about three years old – standing in the aisle between the booths. Their mothers were talking. We had been sitting a few minutes when our waitress asked us if we wanted to move to a different both. Not wanting to be rude, we said we were fine. We soon wished we had taken our waitress up on the offer.

I had assumed that the mothers of these girls had finished eating and that they’d be leaving soon. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The girls proceeded to walk up and down the aisle and even around the corner. One of their mothers kept having to get up to bring them back. They were constantly in the way of the waitresses. The other mother of the two girls spent the entire time talking to her friend, that is when her friend wasn’t answering one of the many cell phone calls that she received on her loudly ringing phone. I feel kind of bad, but as one of the girls approached the heated bins where the corn chips were kept, I didn’t say anything. I figured that if the girl touched the heated container and burned herself, she’d quickly learn that she shouldn’t have done that.

I could not believe how irresponsible these parents were. When I have children, I will not allow them to run free in a restaurant! If I have children who are not capable of sitting in their seats at a restaurant, I simply won’t take them. That will probably mean that we won’t be eating out much when we have young children, but there are other options such as finding a baby sitter or getting take-out. If this had been McDonald's or something like that, then I wouldn't have had as much of a problem with the behavior, but it wasn't!

Tonight, I fired up the grill for the first time in several months. I picked up the propane last night and grilled some chicken breasts for dinner tonight. The chicken tasted a lot better than it does when I cook it on the George Foreman grill. The cleanup is also a lot easer. The Foreman grill can be really hard to clean well, especially if I put anything on the meat. I intend on doing a lot of grilling this spring and throughout the summer.