A Trip To The Dump

It was like a flashback and channeling weekend. My sister and her husband came down for the weekend. This was a good thing since I usually get some work out of them.

My brother-in-law, Ryan, hung a picture they had given me. He also moved the pictures from where I wanted the new picture to go. He replaced the mantles in my gas light. Then, to bleed off excess energy, he did some weeding on my berm. All of this work cost me a steak dinner and some fresh tomatoes that they took back to South Carolina with them. Hell of a deal. My sister had a cut finger so I didn't get any work out of her.

My friend Cindy was gonna have us over for dinner on Saturday night, but she came down with some sort of stomach virus so she had her husband Michael bring the food over to our house. Besides bruschetta
we had tomatoes topped with mozzarella cheese and fresh basil. Guess where the tomatoes came from. Then we had eggplant lasagna. We had parmigiano reggiano for a cheese course and a homemade blueberry pie that my sister had baked for dessert. She picked the blueberries herself in South Carolina. Of course, we had three bottles of wine.

Sometime during the dinner the subject of the Sommelier Guild of Atlanta came up. I remarked that the majority of members had a net worth of over a million dollars. Michael disagreed. The conversation was remarkable similar to What have the Romans ever done for us from The Life of Brian.

Me: There's member A.

Michael: OK.

Me: And Member B.

Michael: Well, OK.

Me: And Member C.

Michael: Yeah.

Me: And Member D.

Michael: Of course. Member D. That goes without saying.

By this time, Ryan was trying to keep a straight face because it sounded just like The Life of Brian.

But on Monday, things got even wierder. If there is one thing my sister likes to do, it is throw things out. I take after my father's side of the family. I am a packrat. I had accumulated some trash in my garage. My sister thought that Monday would be a good time to take it to the dump, especially since I had bought some new pillows and had some old pillows to throw away. Somehow, Alice's Restaurant started running through my head.

Sunday night, we had a Thanksgiving steak dinner that couldn't be beat. The next morning. we loaded the garbage trash from the church garage into the back of a red VW microbus Nissan Frontier pickup and headed off to the dump. We did not have shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction.

When Ryan and I got to the DeKalb County dump we discovered that it was closed had moved somewhere to the wilds of south DeKalb County. This was prime Cynthia McKinney country. The person at the old dump had given us a map, so with tears in our eyes, Ryan and I headed off to south DeKalb County to find the new dump. Unfortunately, we did not have my sister along to navigate.

I admit that there were times that I was looking for a place along the side of a side road to dump the garbage trash, but the last thing I wanted was for the DeKalb County police to have to take twenty-seven eight by ten glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence against us.

With only one wrong turn, Ryan and I made our way to the Seminole Landfill and we were able to successfully dispose of our trash. Ryan tried to call my sister to let her know why it was taking us so long, but my sister had her cellphone turned off, which is the usual mode of operation. I could have suggested that Ryan call my phone number and leave a message since my answering machine is a speaker phone, but I'm an asshole and wanted to listen to them fight. I always arrive early at Michael and Cindy's so I can watch their pre-dinner party fight. They consider me part of the family and have no qualms about fighting in front of me.

Ryan and I returned OK. He and Sherry exchanged words, ate lunch and headed back to South Carolina.

In other news, I was elected president of the Sommelier Guild of Atlanta on Monday night. Yeah. I'm thrilled! That means I have to find the restaurants for our monthly tastings and negotiate with them. It's a thankless job. Now I know why so many restaurants go out of business. Geez! I talk to someone who says that he/she will call me back and he/she never does. Don't they want the business of people who are affluent (lots of millionaires) and eat out a lot?

I think I have the venue for our September tasting, but there is a problem with the menu. I have to have that firmed up so the wine commitee can match the wines to the courses. Arrrgggghhhh! I get to do this for the next two to three years. On the upside, the Guild does pay for the board of directors to sample the restaurants for our annual banquet and the Champagne tasting.

Now if only I can keep my sanity. It's a good thing we found the new dump so I did not get thrown in jail for littering.

You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant...

Posted by denny at July 20, 2005 09:22 PM