Forgotten story from Latin (2 of 2): Ham hock.

I forgot -

One night in Milwaukee I met some college friends at a local German restaurant...

We were the youngest people there by far, though every table was full; my friends noted that though people our age go to Italian restaurants etc. with the same price range, German food is an older person thing.

For an appetizer, we got this cheese-beer-sauerkraut dip you could put on toasted bread slices.

For the entrees, they each got roasted pork chops, and I got this ham hock thing that they boil then bake then flash-fry so the skin is nice and crispy.. It came on the bone and was about 2/3 the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread or a little bit bigger, and it was very tasty...

After I ate the whole top part, though, I turned it over, and it wasn't just fat and bone like I expected, but a whole nother hunk of meat.

"Look, he found another meal," my one friend was like.

After the meal - I ate the whole thing - I got short of breath walking up the stairs to the restaurant's bathroom (which was on the 2nd story).

Also, when we left, I noticed that my full stomach had distended my diaphragm upwards, so my polo shirt hung off there like a tent, and it hadn't been that way earlier in the evening.

When I met people from the Latin program later that evening, they all felt how hard and full my belly was.

Forgotten story from Latin (1 of 2): Beach honeymoon.

One of my fellow Latin students was a Latin teacher from Massachusetts around my age, and she was saying that she had told her husband when they were getting married that she'd plan the wedding, but it was the groom's job to plan the honeymoon, which he did do - a lovely trip in the Bahamas.

The sexiest thing he did was arrange for horseback riding on the beach, and they were galloping along the beach on separate horses with the seawind blowing through their hair etc. - and then a tropical storm came up, and drenched them, and they had to ride back like 15 minutes to the hotel in the pouring rain.

When she got back to the hotel and went to take of her jeans, she found out that because her jeans were soaked, the motion of the horse had made them rub off pretty much all of the top layer of her skin on her inner thighs and buttocks, and she screamed as she took of her jeans, and so for the rest of the honeymoon, she had to put lotion on, and to her husband, she was like, "Don't touch me."

A story from my lawyer friend from Missouri (2 of 2): Kenyan businesswoman.

So, like last summer my one lawyer friend from Missouri went to a help-the-world NGO fair event, and she signed up for a lot of lists and couldn't remember half of them, and then like a month ago some organization called her to see if she'd host a Kenyan businesswoman who got a State Dept. grant to come to the U.S. and see how businesses here run so she could take skills home.

So, she curtained off part of her living room (she has a 1-bedroom), and this girl slept on her couch for like just over a week, and went off in the daytime to business classes... They really got along, and went out for dinner drinks etc., and my lawyer friend from Missouri even met some of the other Kenyans in the area for the program... The Kenyan girl's phone also broke like halfway through the visit, so my friend took calls for her and let her use her phone to call back.

Anyhow, on the day they were going to the airport, my one lawyer friend from Missouri was going to take the subway with her and help her with her baggage, but the Kenyan girl freaked out and was telling her that she didn't have to, that she'd be meeting other friends at the station, and when my friend pressed her, she admitted that this older widowed guy who had called her on the phone was saying bye to her at the airport, and she was saying bye to him.

"Don't you trust me?", the Kenyan girl was like.

My friend thought something was up, but she let her go, and said to call her once she got to the airport, and like an hour later, the girl called her up to say bye.

Then, the next day she got a call from the NGO director, that the Kenyan girl and 2 of her friends never got on the plane, and they were probably staying in the U.S. in violation of her visa.

Later that day, the older widowed guy called to check up to see if the girl left all right, which my one lawyer friend from Missouri found suspicious, so she is going to give his phone number to some legal authorities.

She also got all her locks changed, since the Kenyan girl complimented her on her computer and how nice it was, and might have made copies of her keys.

A story from my lawyer friend from Missouri (1 of 2): Mexican date.

My one lawyer friend from Missouri met a short Mexican chemical engineer at a free salsa event downtown, and she's been on several dates with him.

He took her to a local major league soccer game, but since she was late, they didn't have time to bbq tacos outside, and they didn't sit in the fun fun section (the one filled with all the young hispanics and Poles who do nothing but stand and cheer the entire time), but rather a more sedate one, though still hispanic. Several times during the game he got really worked up and yelled in Spanish at the team, and once he took his shirt off, whirled it around his head, and then put it back on.

After the game ended, because they had come late and had parked in a shitty lot, it would have taken like 45 minutes to get on the road, so since they were both hungry, they took out the bbq and bbq'd tacos post-game, and everyone waiting in their cars kept looking at them.

And, when he was by her apartment once, he noticed that she didn't have the window around her air conditioner closed off well and a lot of hot air was getting in from outside, so he took some cardboard and duct tape and sealed it off.

"That is how Mexicans fix things!", he said.

Disgusting...

1) A silverfish was on the wall the other night when I was talking on the phone. I got a piece of newspaper and killed it.

2) I got my little silver portable coffee thermos off of the sink the other day to pack up and take some place, and when I was reassembling it, I smelled shit... It wasn't, it was just that water had caught in the top and since it's been really hot out, a *ton* of mildew grew in the top, to the point where it smelled so bad it almost smelled like shit. I boiled the top in vinegar and water, and that cleaned it out, but one part of the plastic wasn't as strong and the others and got deformed to the point where I can't reassemble it, so I think I'm going to have to throw it out.

...forgotten point about conservative catholics...

Something I find interesting when I've flipped through conservative catholic home-schooling curricula is that sometimes there's all that conspiracy theory, anti-evolution stuff in there, which has traditionally not been a Catholic issue, but rather more of a concern of Protestant fundamentalists who probably write a lot of the curricula that the conservative catholics end up using...

That's part of the reason I wonder if the conservative rank-and-file will get nuttier and nuttier in Protestant ways, while they think of themselves as returning to tradition.

Hipsters and money.

Hipsters pretend to not care about anything, but I've always found that they care about money.

One example -

I got a cheap beer (a PBR can) at a bar and paid with a $10 bill, and the hipster-ish girl bartender gave me change for a $20, which I pointed out, and she was eternally thankful.

When I came back for another drink, she was nice, but she didn't give me a free beer.