The Tejas Experience

So, last monday eve my father picked me up and I helped him work a food show in Minneapolis tuesday. This was my 3rd food show, second that I've helped at, and it was a little eye-opening. About 200 booths hand out samples of food to entice restaurant owners to buy their company's products, its pretty simple. The food trends toward the easy to prepare and good tasting, meaning deep-fried, fatty, or a delicious combination of both. After being there I'm impressed by how little most run of the mill restaurants actually do in the way of preparation. I would venture that most of the appetizers, a lot of the non-meat portion of the meal, almost all sauces and dressings, and many of the desserts are not actually creations of the restaurant at all but of regional food distributors. I worked primarily on selling salad dressing. I should mention that oil, salad dressing, and gravy provided a good chunk of the finances that allowed me to attend college, and since nursing provided the other major portion I like to feel that it preserves the yin-yang balance in my life. It was kind of funny actually because I believe I was a better food salesman at the tender age of eleven when I was working gravy. I had a pretty good pitch, "Hey mister! you want to try some gravy? its delicious." It somehow worked, my pitch this time was a little subdued. There were two minor highlights of the show, the first was selling about 200 tubs of shortening to the mexican restaurant that does the $.50 tacos that I mentioned semi-recently. Its good to know that they go through loads and loads of the cheap stuff. The other was that in a universe-makes-sense kind of a thing, the hottest girl at the show was selling the sweetest product: ice cream. In other news I really like to invert words like ice cream, or popcorn into creamed-ice and corned-pop, it just amuses me for unknown reasons.

The next day found me in a plane headed south to houston. Milwaukee's "favorite" prognosticator of meteorlogical events was with us to cheer on his hometown houston astros. I was happy to see the white sox win though I generally kept my peace, with the exception of some vigorous fist pumping, when the white sox did well as I was surrounded by starry-eyed astro fans. We were down there for my stepmother's father's 75 b-day party. I'm fairly close to him and so was glad I could make it down. Aside from the rather touching birthday celebrations the other highlight of the trip was the second coming of the whiner bowl. years ago when I was nine(?) we played a game of football with all my brothers and uncles. In retrospect it was funny because all the youngsters started crying at some point. The game culminated with me hiding one of my uncles favorite hats behind a electrical power dealy because I was angry with him. There was less crying this time around but we still managed to have a good time.

Since houston i've been in hyde park the last few days staying and drinking at jason's. Yesterday he and I made a declicious lunch of pita bread, bacon, tofu cooked in bacon grease, bell peppers, hummus, brie, olives, and a type of cheese that I can't remember, it was delicious. Played some ultimate, though I didn't play particularly well, and hung out. I'm off to the city of the rebirthing bird tomorrow for a wedding that apparently will be at Hohokam Park which is where the cubs go every spring to train for a season of broken hearts and dreams. Hopefully the wedding can alter the juju of the place.