Lunch

I joined the group of artists today for their weekly "Sushi Thursday" lunch. I was debating between the white chicken bowl and tacumoshosho*, something that was recommended by both Derek and Ray. I was still waffling back and forth between the two when the waitress came by to take our order. In the end the tacodoohickey** stuff won out. It was tasty. It consisted of breaded and fried pig meat with a side bowl of rice and a sauce that I'm reasonably sure starts with "k". The only problem I had with the meal is the same problem I always have when there's too much of one flavor in any meal. I get tired of it by the end. Still, it filled me up.

Now, on to the interesting bit. I'll bet you didn't know there was an interesting bit. Well hah! There is! Around the end of our meals we were being harassed by a fly. One single, stinking fly. With all of the restaurant to travel around it was consistently buzzing our table and being a nuisance. It was a Leguizamo fly. Derek suggested that I pull a Miyagi move and catch it with my chopsticks. I reminded him that earlier he was pointing out that he would be able to kill me with his chopsticks much easier than I would be able to kill him with mine, so logically he was the one that needed to go Miyagi on the fly. Yeah, it was that kind of lunch.

So the fly kept buzzing us and we were all trying to ward it away from our food and drinks. Finally, the wee bastard managed to land on my glass and poke its wiggly fly head into my straw. I said, "well, that's the last I'll be having of that" and swung my hand its way to try to shoo it toward Derek's drink. Instead it did a side barrel roll and landed on the inside of my glass, so I slapped my hand over the top and it was trapped. But now I was stuck with my hand over the top of my glass, feeling the nasty thing tickling my palm. My glass didn't have enough liquid in it for me to drown it in a Coke hurricane so I looked around the table for an alternative solution. I noticed that the base of my rice bowl looked like it would fit nicely in the mouth of the glass. So I slid the straw out of the glass, and in a move that would have made Harrison Ford proud, I swapped my hand with the rice bowl. I still couldn't do the Coke hurricane though because the bowl was still half full of rice and it would have gone everywhere... unless I covered the rice bowl with one of the sauce bowls... mmm. no.

However, now there was a different problem: what to do with the fly when it was time to go? Should I lift the lid and give it the freedom to resume annoying the other customers? Or just leave it that way for the waitress to find when she cleared off the table? It would be bad enough that she would have thought I was "one of those" customers that do nasty or stupid things with the table leavings, but when she lifted the bowl and had a fly pop out in her face... well, let's just say I wouldn't be remembered fondly. Especially if it flew into her eye and began feasting on her mucus membrane as they tend to do.

I decided that I would tell her about the trapped fly when I went to the register to pay my bill, and then settled in to watch it do laps around the rim of the glass where it met the bowl until everyone else was finished.

When I went up to pay, however, I noticed that the sushi chef had come around and was helping bus the tables. Setting a fly on an unsuspecting waitress would have been bad enough, but a sushi chef? No good would come of that. He had knives.

I quickly went back to the table since he missed the bowl/cup prison tower on the first pass, picked it up, walked to the door to the restaurant and let it go outside. At least it didn't fly back into the restaurant when I closed the door. I was amazed that nothing was said by any of the staff.

And that's how I spent my lunch.

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* not the real name.
** still not the real name.