While I know that eating healthy is best for all of us, and it’s darn hard to eat healthy and not cook the food yourself, I still like food that someone else cooks, serves up, and lets me eat at home without all the hubbub of preparation and clean-up. Plus, timing is always right. There’s no having the potatoes done at one time and the meat done at another. If necessary, I can stick the carry out container in to be zapped and have everything hot and ready at once.
Jack and I live in a pretty small town, with eateries at a premium. There are plenty of fast food establishments, but few actual restaurants to place a to-go order with. And while I love my Quarter Pounders with Cheese and fries from McD’s, sometimes a girl has to have “real” food. So for that I have two favorites to order and bring home for dinner.
I know it’s a chain, but I like Panda Express. Our town must have thirty Chinese restaurants (none of them deliver, by the way—go figure) but of the several we have tried, we just like Panda Express. Nothing spectacular yet nothing disappointing. However, Jack isn’t that crazy about having Chinese too often. Let’s face it, it’s bad for calories, for blood sugar, for carbs, for a lot of things. So, PE is a treat, not a regular carry-out.
Another place we have in town is a pretty good Italian 
restaurant, and their chicken parmesan is fantastic! For that dish alone, I’d have to say that’s our favorite and most used takeaway restaurant. When things were locked down pretty tightly, we could call in our order and they would bring it out to the car. Yummy!
As Jack says, we’re stuck in a rut and we like it. Once we find something we like, we’ll keep with it forever. That goes for carry-out food too, it seems.
What is your favorite restaurant food to eat at home?
Excerpt:
There was a time, in the long ago, when our only choice was to read “real” books. That is to hold an actual thing bound as a hardback or paperback. We had to hold the book open—sometimes to press it to keep it open—and keep it at the proper reading height. Sometimes those tomes were heavy. Sometimes the binding was such that it took real effort to keep the book open and we creased the spines. If we dropped the book, we lost our place. We couldn’t easily prop it open to read while we ate, or we had to hold the book open one-handed if we wanted to drink a cup of coffee. Those days ended for me when hubby bought me an ebook reader for Christmas. I’ve hardly had a better gift!
books to lug around. Then you need places to put them. Now I can carry the equivalent of those boxes on one Kindle. Granted, actual books won’t run out of power in the middle of a chapter and have to be recharged, but the convenience of my Kindle outweighs the inconvenience.
When Jack and I lived in a small town in Virginia, we routinely drove in and out of Richmond and Charlottesville (50 miles and 35 miles respectively) for grocery shopping, plays, dinner, work, etc. and never gave a thought that we were driving those distances on two-lane country roads WITHOUT A DARN CELL PHONE. In fact, there weren’t any cell phones back then. Sure, the thought of breaking down crossed my mind, but houses weren’t spaced out too far, and I just figured I’d walk to one of them and call for help. Now that I have a cell phone? I can’t drive half a mile from home without panicking if I discover I’ve forgotten the phone. I’ve turned into a phone wuss, and I’m not proud of it.
smart phones were out. “You have the oldest phone of anyone I know,” a friend once told me. I smacked the lid down on the screen and said, “I use my phone for making calls. I don’t need all that stuff that comes on smart phones.” Sigh. Or for the naivete! Of course, as soon as I got a smart phone I set up weather, Google, a news app, and Solitaire. I am picking the phone up a hundred times a day to do something on it that doesn’t involve making a call.
I should qualify that title. I’m for the sunshine, if I can watch it from behind a window. I’m not fussy about where that window is—could be in the house or in the car or a restaurant or… You get the idea. Suffice it to say, like Scarlett, I’ve always been one to watch my complexion. Why? Because I burn in nothing flat. Plus, I’m not much of an outdoors person. Plus 2, sunshine means bugs. Flying bugs, crawling bugs, all kinds of bugs. Nope. Not for me. But I am happy to open the blinds and curtains and “Let the sunshine. Let the sunshine in, the sunshine in!” (Courtesy of the 7th Dimension)
the sunshine, it is during the fall. My favorite season, it always seems as though the sky is bluer, the breezes brisker, and the sun most welcome during the autumn. Maybe because we know winter is coming? At any rate, being outside in September, October, or November is a treat. I’ll take the sunshine then, thanks very much!
How Charity Sunday works: for every comment made on this blog post, I will donate money to the charity named. The same promise is made for every blog site listed in the group–click the Linky Links link at the bottom of this post to see the list of participants and read/comment on any of them to see a donation go to that blogger’s charity. We’re all different! Thanks for your help and your participation!
There was a time when I never would have considered reading MM romances. Not that I had anything against them, I just never thought of them. Then hubby went out of town for a business meeting and I went along, just to go. We had dinner with one of his colleagues and he asked what I did. I told him I wrote romance—erotic romance. It had only been recently that I’d admitted that to people. Was I ever surprised when he said his sister also wrote erotic romance—of the MM variety. He put us in touch with each other and after exchanging a few emails. she sent me one of the works she’d just finished. Oh. My. God. It was fabulous!!!
romance and not especially on the sex. And her sexy sequences were explicit but without seeming raunchy—which can happen whether writing MM or MF sex scenes.
Over the years of reading, I’ve fallen in love with angsty characters (ooo-la-la, Mr. Darcy!), sweet characters (Donald in Finding Camlann), quirky characters (Don in The Rosie Project), and any number of alpha males (any of the SEALS in Suzanne Brockmann’s books). But the character that will steal my heart for real, is the one who shows humor. That goes for male or female. If a character makes me laugh, that’s most often a 5-star read for me.
spark of electricity, if they also share a great back and forth in their dialogue, I consider that a winner. Sarah Ney has written a series called How to Date a Douchebag, and all of them contain great banter, Her books make me laugh—and a few have made me tear up. Spectacular interaction. In fact, while writing this post I started reading one of the books in the series again. So, if you’ll excuse me, I plan to add a little humor to my afternoon.
For most of my adult life I lived in the South. That is, Virginia (mostly), North and South Carolina. While the winters in those places can be described as mild—not too much snow, but ice instead (yikes!)—even winter has its problems. When it does turn cold and the wind blows, the humidity in the air causes it to to cut right through you. Still, it’s better than having feet of snow to dig through. When we do have ice and snow, it doesn’t usually last too long.
(32 C) with a humidity (the amount of moisture in the air) of 57%. That means that the heat index (the temperature it feels like) is 100 degrees (38 C). In Orlando, FL (another place I used to live), the temperature is 93 F (34 C) with humidity of 54%. The heat index is 103 F (40 C). Glad I’m not there today!