Local alt. paper Vita.mn made a whole bunch of ‘best’ lists. Click here if you want to see more. Here’s the best restaurants:
I feel pretty lucky to be employed by the #1 spot. I’m really gonna miss that place when I leave.
7. U2
I don’t know why. Maybe because I threw myself at the band for the better part of my Jr High and High school days. Then they made Pop. I liked Pop, but it wasn’t U2 at their finest. But since then even, I’ve loved every album they make and cringe when I hear jabs made at Bono.
6. The Biggest Loser
This one is on my mind today…the new season starts in one hour. I always end up crying when I watch this show. Tuesdays in our house are Biggest Loser/Kleenex nights. We like it that way. (Max actually hates it, but having it on to bother him is a parental right).
5. Farmville
It seemed like everyone I knew was asking me to be their neighbor on Farmville. I was annoyed and finally blocked the app. This facebook app has more users than Twitter, or so I read. I spend a good half hour a day fertilizing my friends crops, plowing and harvesting my own, and virtually ‘petting’ various barnyard animals. I swear when I get my own garden, I will cease this 2D glorious addictive online treat, but not one second earlier.
4. Rum and Coke
I don’t love many drinks to a point where I would drink them for taste alone. Except for rum and cokes. This isn’t a fancy or expensive drink, but I limit the amount of times I drink them, because I always drink more than I want to when I indulge in the Capt. (possibly because of the caffeine, making me not fall asleep as other drinks do after one or two?) And, we all know that leads to haiku texting.
3. Clueless
That is a great movie.
2. Russel Crowe
He’s got a terrible temper.
1. Moving
I want to find a place where I will stay for years and years. This will hopefully be someplace where the Max can bring his kids and drop them off for the weekend and I will spoil them rotten and show them the patch in the wall where their father made a hole when he was practicing hockey in his bedroom. At the same time, I love to move. It’s a whole new adventure and to me, it’s like a vacation for at least the first few months. You meet new people, find new favorite stores and coffee shops. And I have been relatively nomadic for the past sixteen years. I guess when I settle I will have to take more road trips 🙂
I love to eat. This is what I love to eat the most:
I read somewhere that Avatar was ‘sat on’ for close to ten years. The technology to produce it way back when would have been too costly. This means, James Cameron could have used the time and developed the movie extensively. He clearly chose not to. I imagine him running to CGI experts every six to twelve months and saying, “Are we there yet?” After each rejection he sulked away like The Max does when I tell him he may not have ice cream for breakfast.
The public was presented with this epic sci-fi film which seemingly everyone is going to love love love! The effects in the movie are going to blow us away! Actually, they did. I am not a huge fan of fancy computer graphic movies. I like my cartoons to look like cartoons and real life to look like real life.
I think they finally sold me on CGI on this film, and that’s the only thing they did. Except for the tree…the rope light glowing tree. I wasn’t much a fan of that. However, I loved the tree the Na’vi lived in, and I would like to live there too. The blending of CGI and real life shots was the best I have seen. Certainly we have come a long way since Roger Rabbit.
Now I am going to tell you why I think it sucked:
Everything else.
The characters and the dialog were so dry that I felt like I was watching a visually stunning episode of a Saturday morning cartoon. I saw the scary money hungry evil white men who wanted to murder the perfectly peaceful blue Smurf/human types for, of course, financial gain. The Jake Sully character was so easy he would have converted to their way of life even if they sat in poo all day while singing the Macarena. I’d go on dissecting the characters, but I am annoyed by them.
The plot was dumb. It required a completely gullible viewer to be enjoyed. If this was the first movie you had ever seen in your life, you would have loved it. But, the story was a mish mash of Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves with a futuristic spin. Good overcame evil in the most uncreative possible way.
So, why is this the BEST of something? Cause I am still glad I saw it. It sure was purty.
I work at Hell’s Kitchen, a unique and tasty restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. We are known for our breakfast and our weekend brunches are an environment where people wait hours..literally…to get a table. Even in this economy, we can pack the house on a regular basis.
I quit working weekend brunches over a year ago. Not because I necessarily wanted to, but getting a babysitter on the weekend is a toughy. So, I am a M-F daytime waitress. Not very common in this industry, but I love it.
Today, however was a weekend in the eyes of the world as it is indeed, New Years Day. I walked into work this morning just before seven am. I was playing up my crabby demeanor because my usual coffee shop was not open because of the holiday. I missed on my desire for caffeine to wash away the single glass of champagne I drank last night. My coworkers were in various states of hangovers as well. None of us were as hungover as we were snarky about the fact we froze (we will not see anything higher than -3 this weekend) in commute to get to work so early on a holiday that was showing itself to be financially unfruitful.
The first two hours or so of business proved to be pointless. There were no customers. The staff sat around, drinking coffee and eating eggs while our lame stories of early to bed New Year’s Eve’s were exchanged.
Somewhere around 9:00am the entire population of the state of Minnesota congregated in the entryway. From that moment until this evening, when I clocked out, I ran. RAN. I ran from table to table. I ran from the bar to the kitchen. I never got the chance to run to the bathroom. Sometimes a restaurant server knows they can squeeze an extra few bucks outta you if they ignore nature and schmooze you instead.
About two o’clock, when I am normally ending my day, I looked at a fellow server and said, “Guess what? They said I get to go home now!” I swear she teared up. I was lying with the evil intentions of seeing what the reaction I could induce when most intense form of jealousy arose.
We all stayed. And we apparently broke a brunch record. We broke a brunch record with no business for the first two hours of the shift. And I broke a server record. And it was awesome.
I informed my slightly tipsy final table of the day that their last round of drinks pushed me over the edge to record sales. This was a lie, I broke sales before this point. But I wanted to celebrate and they were the perfect folks with which to do so. The whole lot of them high fived me and left me a ridiculous tip. They were/are the perfect customers.
Today was not only a day of best sales, but BEST day of work. I had a blast, even after the slow and foggy brained start. 2010 is starting out well.
If you are a blogger, you may have heard of NaBloMofo.com (I cannot remember the actual name of the site). Every month, they give an idea, and if is meant to jum start ideas for your blog writings. This month the theme is BEST. I am capitalizing BEST because NaNoKokomo capitalized it.
I usually dismiss the topic, after it is suggested. Emails telling me the theme from NaNowhateveritis feel like SPAM. I do this also, because I have no train of thought that last longer than a minute and stretching it to a month is a toughy. But, BEST?! BEST could equal lists. I am obsessed with lists. Best songs, books, methods of torture… I could stumble across the BEST hemorrhoid cream list and read it top to bottom because it is a LIST.
BEST…..
and add
LIST……
I can do this.
January is BEST (LIST) month.
Happy New Year Pilverers and Pilverettes!
I think NY’s resolutions are dumb. I have quit bad habits and started good ones before many times. Never being on the back of the first of the year, they just come when they come. But I figured I should write some just to feel festive. Two Thousand and Ten, you look purty.
Fact: I spent all of my hard earned minimum wages in high school on clothing. Fact: I probably dressed fairly trendy for a kid in the nineties. Fact: I cannot grow for some reason, so I still fit into all those clothes. If I dressed in these nowadays, it would probably be akin to someone in 1999 sporting a great pair of acid wash jeans and belly football jersey. Bottom line, I need to toss the pleather Airwalks and massive amount of Delia*s cataloug clothing that I never, ever wear.
I spent a week in the sticks last summer. I had no internet, cell service, or even regular old dial phone. I didn’t actually think about it much as I was busy chasing chickens and the like. But now, I am always with the iphone which allows me twitter, facebook, texts, AIM, skype, and once in awhile I make a real phone call. If it’s here, I am going to use it. But maybe I’ll make it so it cannot be here for a week or so once again.
I stopped a few years ago. I developed a taste for bubbles once again. I never thought soda was the devil and I still indulged now and then. But my sometimes 2 cans a day now, is kinda gross. This morning I woke up at 4:30, and being as the coffee was taking too long I cracked open a can of cherry coke. I got heartburn for breakfast.
Would be easier if I bothered to finish my last year of college…
Up until I was 24, I could fly anywhere without thinking about it…at all. Nothing about it bothered me. Then I took a flight without Max, and I basically lost it. I kind of wish I had a video of myself on that flight (which was one of those where even the flight attendants freaked a bit). I was quite literally the worst passenger on the plane at that moment. After that I flew a half a dozen more times, but I was a wreck the entire time. So I just decided to quit flying. That was four years ago. I’m determined to get over that.
It’s nothing. It has been nothing other than a placeholder or a link to this blog since I bought it almost four years ago.
For the past five years maybe, I’ve read the articles telling me the top however-many-songs from the previous year. I usually recognize one or two. It’s not that I don’t listening to popular music that bothers me, it’s that I never hear new music. I need to fix that.
The Pilver 