A Guy Named Renfield

That’s right, Olive Garden. I’ve gone on record as to my dislike of chains for restaurant choices, but they’re hard to avoid when you want something now, baby, now. I could be unkind and say that of my recent chain experiences this one sucked the least, but actually we had a really nice meal and experience. I can say that the youth and inexperience of both the host and waitress were glaring, but not detrimental. I do think our waitress was rather free in her use of “you guys” when referring to my wife and me, but at least she didn’t make use of the dreaded “no problem” in place of “you’re welcome”.

She started by offering us a sample of a blush wine, which my wife did select with her meal. It was good, if a little cloying even for her; I’ll wean her away from white zin yet! I ordered a Clos Du Bois Merlot, and raised an eyebrow when I noticed the price. This was the exact same wine I had ordered at Timpano in Bethesda a few weeks ago. While that restaurant was much more upscale, I was shocked to realize that the price disparity between the glass of wine there and the glass of wine here at Olive Garden was more than double. Normally, when you order a glass of wine at a restaurant, a glass of wine is brought to your table and set in front of you. At Olive Garden, the wine bottle is brought to your table and poured for you by the waitress. At Timpano, they bring the empty wine glass to your table, along with a small carafe containing your wine. Your glass is placed in front of you, and then the waiter pours your wine from the carafe. I found the extra step curious, seeing no point to pouring it from the bottle to a carafe to a glass, but I appreciated the show. I will say, that between the Olive Garden, a bottle I bought recently from a store, and Timpano, the glass of wine at Timpano tasted the best. It is very subjective, I know, but maybe the extra step allows it to breathe more, or maybe their sommelier was sure to buy a particularly good vintage for them. Maybe you do get what you pay for, but the glass I had there was still not worth the price, and the glass I had at Olive Garden still was.

I ordered a shrimp and asparagus dish which came served over a creamy risotto, and my wife ordered a bowl of toscana soup (spicy sausage and potatoes). Both were delicious. Some may cock their eyebrows at my ordering a fish dish in a cream sauce to go with my red wine, but I proscribe to modern wine theory which basically goes : order what tastes good!

A friend of mine works for the Brooklyn Park Public Library. Last year, instead of the standard story time with a bowl of candy, the library decided they wanted to host a haunted house. My friend is also a member of the Greater Columbia Fantasy Costumers Guild, so called on them for their assistance.

We set about transforming the conference area in their basement into a vampire’s crypt, a mummy’s chamber, a mad scientist’s laboratory, a warlock’s study, and a giant spider’s web. My wife and I dressed as monster hunters (well, she had a sword; I think I was dressed as a Cossack gypsy or something) and guided small groups through the dark hallways, from station to station as they were harassed by ghosts and collected the talismans they needed to escape the evil dungeon.

The community was very appreciative of the free event, and we were all asked to do it again this year. We’re very heartened at reports of kids comparing haunted house stories – “No, you should come to this one; it’s a lot scarier than Arundel Mills.” This year we have chosen a different theme, probably because one of the members bought a mask based on a certain recent summer blockbuster, but it could just be a coincidence for all I know. While we’re getting some help from the anime club that meets at the library, I’m hoping we can convince a few others to be guides as well. Three was barely enough last year, just between the rambunctious boys who kept sneaking back in line and the girls who got so scared they literally climbed the walls at every turn, and with the word of mouth we’re expecting a much larger crowd.

My wife is hitting the thrift store today to see if she can find pieces for our costumes. That’s what she did last year, but I’m convinced we have enough items in our closet to make decent characters. She thinks I should wear a red-and-white striped shirt like Kirk Douglas from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. I told her I could wear a matching cap and glasses and just say, “Hey, kids! Where am I?”

After the haunted house Saturday afternoon (12-4, I think) I’ll be heading to Columbia to perform in a staged radio play with Prometheus Radio Theatre for a Halloween show at the Maryland Academy of Music. We’ll be performing a classic radio script of a spooky story; I’m still not sure what the foley guy is going to do about the rats. After our performance, the Boogie Knights will be singing, they’re a local filk group that takes pop songs and sings them with fantasy or medieval lyrics.

It will be a fun but busy day.

Wednesday is New Comic Day, which, as it says, is the day of the week new comic books are released to the stores. Being an avid collector, I have developed a ritual of sorts I follow each “hump day”. I usually go straight home from work, but if I go straight there it affords me the extra time to do some of the following out of order.

After dinner, I leave the house by 6:30. This allows me enough drive time through the remains of rush hour and gives me browse time in the store before they close at 7:30. Comics Kingdom is a great little store, and I carefully chose it using fairly stringent criteria I have for comic shops. It has a wide selection and variety of product (aside from the graphic novels, books, and toys, they also sell belly dancing supplies), a good stock of back issues, a pull service (regular customers get a discount), and they have to remember me (which they do to a fault; after setting up my account, they continued to call me by the name on my driver’s license until my wife came in one day and expressed confusion. Now, they call me Renfield like everyone else.)

After leaving the comic shop, I may or may not go into the Super Fresh or Rite Aid across the street, if I happen to need groceries or medicine. Super Fresh just had a major expansion and includes a lot more items and choices, particularly with organic and earth-friendly options. I guess they re-fitted it as a Super Super Fresh to compete with the Whole Foods right up Falls Road. The one near my house is still the dinky regular kind and it just seems so pathetic by comparison.

From there, I will go around the corner to the Wine Underground. It’s an amazing wine shop with a couple of wine experts on staff. I usually pick up a red and a white, and while I sometimes browse the extensive racks, I usually just give them a price range and go with whatever they recommend. Depending on the stops I’m making, I may pick up a six-pack from their extensive beer case as well. It’s always a nice place to go, classy without being snooty. I’ve seen people in line with a six-pack of Bud and a person right behind them who just selected a $200 Bordeaux from the cellar (Yes, “cellar”. That’s how the store gets its name and if you’ve never been you should request a tour even if you think the selection down there is out of your range.)

If I haven’t had dinner, I will probably drive from there over to the Avenue and pick a restaurant. Usually it’s Golden West Café, mainly because it is so offbeat with its Southwestern and Asian offerings on the menu, as well as its style of décor and management. A good standby is the venerable institution that is Café Hon, a good choice if you’re looking for meatloaf or other comfort foods. There are several other offerings, and I do like to try new places, but sometimes it backfires. There was some new restaurant we tried there a few months ago. I forget the name, but it emphasized nice art, and is a BYOB place. I’ve never liked bringing my own wine to a restaurant, it just makes me feel cheap. Kind of irrational, but that’s me. The only reason we went in there was because it was the start of crab season and my wife was craving a softshell crab sandwich. It was the first place we walked by that advertised it on the chalkboard out front so we went in. Turns out the thing was inedible; it was grilled over a fire and dried out completely. If I was able to hear what my wife was saying over the background music, I would have had her send it back. For the record, my mushroom ravioli was excellent.

Across the street from Golden West is Atomic Books, and I like to stop in there if I have the time. It’s an incredibly eclectic book shop, and it’s had many locations in the city before settling on this one. It carries a lot of titles you won’t find in a regular bookstore (one of their sections is labeled “Revenge”), as well as many you will (it’s where I got my wife Alton Brown’s latest cookbook.) It carries comic books and graphic novels as well, has a very interesting adult section, hosts a knitting circle downstairs, and I understand John Waters uses it for a mail drop.

From there I’ll head down 83 and cut over past Patterson Park to the clubhouse of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society (yes, we have one.) After hanging out amid the book stacks and movie posters with the BSFS crew for a while, I’ll take my leave and head home, to repeat the process again next week.

Actually, while this was my pattern for a long while, with the recent trend to make superheroes act like irrational politicians instead of respected icons, comic books haven’t been as fun to read so I’ve been having fewer titles pulled for me and haven’t been going through my Wednesday routine as often. Still, it’s not like comic book shopping is the only reason to leave the house.

This is one of my wife's favorite movies. She has always been enamored of the film. She has designed and worn award-winning costumes based on Jack and Sally. I'm pretty sure we have the soundtrack somewhere. We have gone to see it every time it has been re-released in the theaters. Due to the subject matter, that happens on a fairly regular basis much to my wife's delight. With the new wrinkle of the 3-D format, I'll be interested to see if theaters continue to show it around the holidays. Will they still be able to get the old version, or will they have to be prepared to invest in the funky glasses for the new version?

The 3-D is neat. It's not spectacular, which is not surprising since the movie wasn't originally filmed to take advantage of that format. Tim Burton probably would have interjected quite a bit of neat stuff if he had any inkling this was on the horizon when he made it. The neatest thing done with the effect is in the bit at the beginning when they advertise their new “we can run any film through our 3-D computer and make it look this cool” process. Beyond that it does make the film look neat, but by the end you really get used to it and barely notice.

Myself, I've never been a big fan of the film. I like the premise and story well enough; Sally's infatuation with Jack is wonderful to watch. Sally is a wonderfully imagined and crafted character and she brings life to every scene she's in. The songs and designs are where the film leaves me underwhelmed. Any fan of Tim Burton knows that you go to his films so you can see how wacky he designed everything. There is a lot of eye candy in this one as should be expected, but as with all his designs it's big on flash but short on detail. I'd like to see more done with the designs and characters in the background, but the camera rarely stays in one place long enough to show off anything. I've also never been able to figure out why the boogeyman is portrayed as an obsessive-compulsive gambler or what the heck that has to do with Halloween. The songs are really what lose me, though. I like Danny Elfman as a composer. His scores in every Tim Burton flick are always wonderful pieces. Unfortunately, these are songs that are actually sung, and they are all clunky, wandering and disruptive. Every time he has Jack sing about being “The Pumpkin King” I am reminded of Alfalfa singing “The Barber of Seville”.

It did start off with “Knick Knack”, one of Pixar's early animated shorts about a frustrated snowman in a snow globe. It's a hoot no matter what format it's in. I kind of wondered why they didn't create a new short to run with the movie. I figured a new short would attract people who would want to see that and stay for the film, but I guess it was cheaper to run an old stand-by through the 3-D computer than create a new one. I don't see this release generating a huge amount of revenue, but given the cost overhead and Disney's recent lack of creativity, I predict a trend...

The Small Press Expo is a comic book convention focused on independent titles and their creators. Independents provide an alternative for comic book fans who desire to read about something other than superheroes. Over the years, the independent market has grown, and so has SPX. It was held in the new Bethesda North Marriott Conference Center, which is very nice and large, but unfortunately is a victim of Marriott’s current hideous design scheme. At least, being a brand new facility it doesn’t look as bad as the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn which had day-glo carpeting and paint schemes shoehorned into the pre-existing and formerly tasteful architecture.

The day didn’t start off that well, although my wife did decide to accompany me. “Honey, you do realize that despite its focus, it is still a comic book convention, right?” She has just started working from home and was looking for any excuse to get out of the house, so with the promise of a nice lunch out we drove down to Bethesda. Unfortunately, I’m not real familiar with that area, the conference center is too new to mapquest, and the directions on SPX’s web site were crap. After going an hour out of our way, we finally found it.

The show is a real hotspot for the publishers and creators. It’s one of the main times of the year when they get to meet and hang out. It must be an incredible experience, but for the regular attendee, it’s all about the dealer’s room. It’s worse than a regular convention, because not only are the people behind each table making a sales pitch, what they’re selling is the art they’ve poured their heart and soul into. I was in a particularly black mood when I walked in, though, and if the dealers were not picking up on that I was in a better temperament to ignore them outright.

A note on independent comic books. For the most part, they’re exactly that. They’re completely self-published from start to finish, so the only person you have to please is yourself. Since there are usually no editors involved looking at a bottom line to sell thousands of issues to turn a profit, the standards on the artwork and production values are very low. This means that almost all of the artwork involved is alternative, or to put it another way, freakishly bad. With the advent of modern technology, there are only a very small number of the offerings that look like they were printed on a Xerox machine and hand-stapled together, so it is safe to say that there is something there for everyone.

One problem I’ve been having recently is that since the independents are constrained by individual budgets and time constraints, there is a very low production frequency. Ergo, even a few of the creators that were there that I’m a genuine fan of, such as Alex Robinson and Carla Speed McNeil, had no new material to offer me. There were lots of other creators there – the new space was an absolute necessity – but it’s tough to find a gem among all the “alternatives”. My wife did find a few items that interested her at the Slave Labor Graphics and Drawn and Quarterly tables; no big surprise, they are both publishers of independent graphic novels, which is fine if you feel like dropping twenty dollars and up at a crack. She also picked up a baby jumper for some friends from a company called Squidfire that was selling baby clothes with Cthulhu-style prints.

After an exhaustive search, I did actually find the two items I was looking for at the show. “Ultimate Peanuts”, a mini-comic I had heard about, detailing a day in the life of some grown-up comic strip characters. It wasn’t actually for sale due to copyright issues, but was free if you bought something else from the table, so I picked up “Ronthology” another mini-comic the creators had put together to make fun of a friend who had ostracized them. A fine concept for a comic book, I feel, although the art in both was very “alternative”. I also found a copy of Papercutter #2, an anthology that included a story by Colleen Coover, an artist whose work I admire and look for wherever possible. I also picked up a copy of Class of '99 by Josh Eiserike. It has a cute end interesting story about a prom night, and has a very interesting twist ending. The art is alright, but I think I picked it up because the creator was friendly enough to penetrate my grumpy veneer. He did wind up winning the convention’s Outstanding Debut Award for it. That goes back to what I was saying about production frequency. The convention actually has a separate award category for anyone who actually manages to produce a comic book that year.

After the show, we headed for the promised lunch. SPX had provided a restaurant locater handout, which was well put together and we found very handy. I was in the mood for someplace good, and was leaning towards PF Chang’s, but there was an Italian place that was highly recommended on the handout. I was a little worried that it was the only $$$ restaurant on the list, but since they gave Starbuck’s two $$, I didn’t think it would be too bad. Timpano is a very nice restaurant in Bethesda. It’s upscale but not daunting, built around a Frank Sinatra theme. While it was pricey, it was not beyond what I would want to pay for a nice meal. I was a little put out that the waiter’s recommendation for a glass of wine happened to be the most expensive one on the menu (I don’t like the idea of a glass of wine being more than ¾ the price of my entrée) but it was truly excellent. We both had a “box lunch”, a pris fixe order I think they have on the menu to impress a lunch crowd that’s looking to impress. It included salad, sandwich/entrée, soup, and dessert; she ordered the Hepburn and I got the Sinatra. The waiter was polite and informative throughout, and I may hit the place next year when I inevitably return to SPX.

I think I’ve mentioned Tony Foreman before. He’s the owner of Bin 604 and Pazo and some other hot area restaurants. His wife Cindy Wolf usually gets all the press as a celebrity chef of sorts. He maintains his own blog, and he usually posts about wine tasting or food. Considering he owns four restaurants and a wine shop, it is usually very detailed and full of intricacies about different wines. It can be interesting, but is usually fairly dry, kind of like a ’01 California Granache.

His most recent blog entry was rather refreshing. It was his wife’s birthday, so he took her to an Italian restaurant. Well, he took her to Italy. After driving through a couple European countries, they arrived at their hotel and lo and behold the reservation was screwed up and they couldn’t check in. He didn’t go into many details about that, but it sounded like the kind of situation that makes for the excoriating reviews on tripadvisor that are so much fun to read. So they left the hotel to find another one, deciding that they didn’t even want to stay in the same region they were so miffed. I gather that the drive to Cernobbio to Lucca is probably equivalent to Baltimore from DC, so it really makes me itch wondering how bad their treatment was to drive them that far.

After they checked into the new hotel, they got directions to a good restaurant nearby. Walking directions in a centuries-old Italian town have got nothing on Mapquest on its worst day. After the third piazza and the left through the alley, I’m not sure I could have safely navigated out of the lobby. They did eventually find their way there, by that time completely starving for dinner, and saw the long line out the door of people with their families. And it was definitely a family place, from children to grampa, the place was crowded and noisy. The whole reason this all caught my attention and I felt it worth blogging about here, is that these are the people who own some of the classiest restaurants in Baltimore, and for dinner they wound up at Shakey’s. You know that classic scenario in situational comedies where the rich couple dines uncomfortably amidst the common folk? It definitely had that vibe throughout. He wasn’t very complimentary about their wine, I’ll say that. Of course, it was a popular restaurant for a reason and they were in the middle of Italy, so the description of the food they ordered was absolutely heavenly. I was glad to hear that his wife had an enjoyable birthday eventually.

One note about that restaurant. I may have referred to it as “Shakey’s”, but I couldn’t actually come up with an equivalent allegory because there really isn’t one. Italy is a different country and anyone who expects things to be exactly the same way there as here is a fool, and Tony and his wife definitely do not fall into that group. It doesn’t change the tone of his entry, and I hope he doesn’t get offended if he ever reads this one. I was just impressed that he finally had a blog entry where he sounded like a regular person, by which I mean, I guess, he complained about stuff.

The prospect of going out to buy a futon seemed unavoidable, so I decided to throw in the towel and buy some new jeans while we were at it. I hate clothes shopping maybe more than I hate furniture shopping. It’s not just the frustration of trying to find something in my size; it’s mainly that even when I do find something in my size, it’s not in my size. How can pants that are supposed to be the same length have one pair that doesn’t reach my ankles and another swallows my whole foot? And how are you supposed to find the right size when they’re designed to shrink? It’s even worse with the clown pants that are so “fashionable” these days. The first Sunday circular I grabbed that advertised a jeans sale was JCPenney, so we decided to go to Marley Station Mall (“Yuppie Station Mall” to those in the know).

A wrong turn landed us in downtown Glen Burnie, so as long as we were there I decided to stop in at the game shop at the corner of Key Highway and B&A Blvd. to see if they had any Pirates cards in (Davy Jones’ Locker is still sold out.) While we were there, we noticed that there was a futon shop on the opposite corner, so we went in and looked around. We found one we liked, ordered it and paid for it. It’s nice, and we needed it, but I’m glad this is for the home office and therefore a business expense.

By the time we were done, though, we were famished. My wife, knowing our destination, was already looking forward to a double dog with the works from Ann’s, but was so hungry she considered stopping somewhere else first. Ann’s Dari-Crème has been in business a long time. They were one of the businesses in the area when the mall started to be built. They were offered a large sum for their land, but they didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. Now they exist in a little crèche just between the mall’s parking lot and Ritchie Highway, and they do box office business. Their building is particularly tiny, and a rush of ten customers makes it almost impossible to stand inside. You walk up to the counter, tell them your order, and step to the side. They don’t write anything down, and no matter how many people or orders they have, the wait is never very long. When I walked in, the line, as usual, was practically out the door. A woman came in behind me and asked me if the line was moving fast because she was in a hurry. I said, “Honey, it’s Ann’s. The line is always fast.” Hunger could have colored my perceptions, or maybe I jinxed things, but while we weren’t zipping through, the wait wasn’t unreasonable. The hot dogs themselves are foot-longs, served on plain white sub rolls. You can order them with your choice of toppings, but I’m glad I know what choices are available because they’ve changed their signage and I didn’t see them listed anywhere. “The works” consist of chili (near as I can tell it’s Hormel, right out of the can), mustard, and chopped onions. Absolutely none of the pieces stand out in my opinion, but put them all together and they are very good. Maybe not as incredibly good as my wife feels, but it’s worth it to go to Ann’s just for the experience. Even though they did, for the first time, screw up my order (bringing me a single instead of a double) but they fixed it quickly. Maybe the charm’s in the simplicity, but we’ll be back.

Maybe when I need some more jeans.

Well, we had originally gone out looking for dim sum again. After some hard work around the house, my wife and I decided to check out local thrift stores to see if we could find “just the right piece of furniture”. A friend had told us about a new dim sum place on Rt. 40 in Ellicott City, just past Rt. 29, so we headed that way to try to find it. After we passed the junction of 29, we didn’t see anyplace that looked promising, so we decided it must be in that little shopping center where the two highways meet, as almost every business in there looks to be Korean-owned. However, we took the wrong turn and wound up on 29 South, so we just decided to hit one of the places in Dobbin Center on Rt. 175, and so we found ourselves at Don Pablo.

It’s a Mexican chain restaurant, and the food is fairly palatable. People mainly come there to swim in the margarita glasses, so the assembly line food is not expected to be incredibly captivating anyway. The “Three Amigos Enchiladas” I ordered were tasty enough, as anything would be when drowned in that much melted cheese. My wife’s relleno, while also good enough for the price and place, did betray the cooking style and philosophy. A relleno is supposed to be a stuffed pepper, but to cut corners on preparation and time, they merely placed the food on the plate and covered it with the pepper.

That, I think, points up one of the chief things I hate about chain restaurants. I can’t bring any real expectations to the table, so I can’t really complain when those expectations aren’t met. (I hoep La Madeline isn’t a chain, we’ve been eyeing that French place for a while.)

My wife and I have been to Pazo before, and are always looking for an excuse to go back, so when one of the people who joined us there for my last birthday dinner mentioned that he really wanted to try the place again, we enthusiastically set a date. He wanted to bring two friends of his, and then it turned out that they wanted to bring a friend of theirs. We knew Pazo had a prix fixe dinner for six as part of their standard menu, so we invited another friend of ours. Then it turns out that our friend's friends' friend wanted to invite her bridesmaid, so we debated on whether to invite three more friends to get the prix fixe for ten, or one more and get the prix fixes for six and two. That solved itself when our other friend had to cancel, bringing us back to six. However, on the day of the reservation our friend's friends got called in to work, canceling that entire group, leaving us with just our original three. We decided to go anyway.

Pazo is a nice restaurant located between Fell's Point and Little Italy (okay, Harbor East). It's a Mediterranean tapas place, with a fantastic atmosphere and wine list. It was opened by Cindy Wolf, Baltimore's answer to a celebrity chef until Duff Goldman stole her thunder by actually appearing on the Food Network, and her husband Tony Foreman. They own some other restaurants in the city, Charleston and that French bistro with the obnoxious commercials, as well as the wine shop down the street. That last part sounds really down home Baltimore, but the wine shop in question is Bin 604, one of the premiere cornerstones of Harbor East, a distinction it got by the dubious honor of being one of the first major players to move in when the area finally started getting refurbished (if making the area intensely gloomy by cramming as many skyscrapers together into as small a space as possible counts as “refurbished”.)

We arrived right on time, valet parking as all the construction does not make for a pleasant walk no matter where you find a spot and were shown to the bar to wait. I suppose you know it's a pricey place when the bartender doesn't bother to charge you for your sodas, but the wait was just long enough that I wound up ordering a glass of the house red. I'm sure if I searched, I could find blogs filled with the debate about their wineglasses alone. They are stylized glasses, rounded at the bottom; essentially a wineglass without the stem and stand. They've caught a lot of flak from wine lovers who feel that wine should only be served in a glass with a stem. I'm fairly indifferent, really, and I do appreciate the design. I'm sure it also cuts down on spills, which is appreciated at any restaurant. The purists believe that holding the glass by the sides will warm the wine. The owners countered that it can only ever warm it by three degrees, not enough to notice. They also say that they brought the idea over from Europe, where many restaurants serve wine that way. I believe them, but I can't help but wonder: good restaurants?

One of the reasons I like Pazo is for the large open area it has inside. There's a wide dining area below with tables, couches and the bar, and dining areas upstairs that look down on it all. I wish I could remember what we ordered, but I never do. On the watress' recommendation, we ordered the Sicilian prix fixe for two, and a steak to round it out for three. We did hold onto a menu so we could identify the items when they were brought. They were all delicious, and we were amazed that we had a few leftovers. Our friend felt badly about the reservation confusion, so he surprised us by springing for dinner. It made em feel bad later when I accidentally bogarted the doggie bag. Well, maybe not that bad. Like I said, the food was great.

When my wife first moved to Maryland from New Jersey in 1999 (when she was still my fiancée), she worked a series of temp jobs at first. She had worked in a farm store for seventeen years, and wanted to find something that would be a good fit. By sheer happenstance, several of the temp jobs were in the same business park where I worked. One day, my boss walked into my office and asked me if I knew anyone who would be interested in working in Customer Service. I knew that department was looking for people, but it took some prodding for me to realize that he was specifically suggesting my fiancée. Shortly afterwards, we found ourselves working for the same company.

While the company does have rules about interoffice relationships, relatives can work in the same office so long as they have different supervisors. It was tough not expressing overt public displays of affection, but we maintained a professional decorum at all times. The only possible exception was that we arranged our schedules to always eat lunch together. Not a big deal, but new employees always looked strangely at the couple eating off the same plate until they found out. After a while, my wife was encouraged to apply for an Assistant position that had opened up in the Sales department. She did so and got the job, with fortuitous timing as Customer Service was downsized two months later. Plus, her office was now right next to mine.

While that lasted a few years, recent events have caused another change. One of our competitors has bought a segment of our business. It's kind of a strange corporate America deal, but the turnout is that my wife works for the segment that didn't get bought but I do. So we've turned one of our bedrooms into a home office, and that's where she'll be working from now on. As of Monday, I will be an employee of a different company. On Friday we conducted a final Inventory of our warehouse, so that all counts would be official and the new company would know exactly what they were getting. At one point towards the end of the day, my wife asked for an item from the supply closet and I showed her where it was. As we looked at each other in the small confined space, we shut the door and started kissing. It was a fine end to a busy day, and a nice final chapter to a way of life we had gotten used to enjoying.