Little surprises

No, I'm not pregnant. So not pregnant. :0) Not THAT kind of little surprise.

Remember I said something about looking for "what surprises" in a post last week at some point? Well, I'm been looking for them. I'm wondering if there are less surprises when you look for them, though. I mean, it kind of takes away the element of surprise if you're looking for one, right? I did find a few. Rather than post in list format, I think I'll just ramble. I'm good at it. (No surprise, right?)

Friday evening, we thought we'd try a new restaurant. We live, seriously, in the chain food capital of the world. I've heard they pilot food franchises here in our area because we have the highest per capita eating out population. Or something like that. So, we've made it our goal as a family for the last several years to try weird little family owned or off-the-track restaurants, with some misses and some hits. For a long time, we did Mexican, trying to find a really good one, but we finally gave up. We do not care to recall our last attempt. Since then, we've stuck with tried and true, if mostly adequate.

The place we went Friday was kind of a chain, but a chain local to DFW. Todd and I went to one in Dallas a few months back, the food was pretty good, and we'd seen the ads for the one more local to us. Shall we say it was interesting, and that is no understatement? We shall.

It's an Italian place specializing in Egyptian pizza (Huh? Yeah. Oval, very thin, cut into strips, pepperoni nowhere in sight.) We did get pizza, and it was pretty good, although not as good as the NY strip steak with "special butter sauce" and fettucini alfredo we had in Dallas. The girls (my daughter and her friend) stuck with the traditional and oh-so-Italian cheeseburger and fries. The fries were cottage sliced, which puzzled them a bit (read: got eaten by the adults).

These were greatest surprise elements: (oh, I guess I WILL make a list. A short one.)

1) When I called to get specific directions (I was hoping for an intersection), the guy told me it was in the same parking lot as Show-time Caberet. Hmm, perhaps that should have been a warning. The small town where it's located has a great reputation for these establishments, but we didn't expect it to be quite so ... close. (EDIT: Spelling incorrect on the business name. Leaving it that way on purpose to keep the vultures away. My traffic already increased dramatically this morning as a result of this post, and I wondered if that would happen! Creeps.)

The truth is, the restaurant is in the same BUILDING as SC. The unisex restroom, in fact, shares a WALL with SC. The girls were fascinated by the loud, pounding music coming from the other side of the wall. We tried to explain that it was a bar of sorts, and they said it sounded like dance music. We said, well, yes ... and told my 10-year-old's friend to explain to her parents later that we did not intend to take her to a restaurant that shared a parking lot, building, or restroom wall with a bar where there was lots and lots of, um, unusual dancing going on. :)

2) The restaurant in Dallas probably seated 100 or so. This location had a "capacity 49" sign, but only about 7 tables, maybe 30 seats max. Definitely geared for the small town crowd. (Perhaps the between dances crowd.) When we got there, the only lighting was flourescent strips over the cooking area, which was walled off by a shoulder high partition. It was about 8 p.m., so it was nearly dark outside already, but there was no lighting at all over the tables. Todd whacked me on the head with his menu at one point when he said I was stealing his light from the kitchen while he was trying to read. After we'd been there about 30 minutes, the one waitress came around and lit the little oil lamps on the tables. Up to that point, we were quite literally in the Twilight Zone.

Anyway, that was so weird it was funny. Lots of surprises.

That was Friday night. Friday morning, I was on my way to pick up girls from swim team and transport them to school when a low billboard on the country lane I was driving caught my eye. I didn't notice it until I was almost past, but I swear it said, "Paranormal Investigations." I did a double take, but it was too late. When the girls got in the car I asked them to remind me to read the sign again when we drove past. We were all psyched, ready to be really amazed and taken aback by a paranormal investigations agency in our sleepy little middle school neighborhood.

But, tell me, doesn't this look like Paranormal Investigations if you look at it really fast while swinging your head?

But before I solved that mystery, I was waiting at a stoplight behind a big ol' truck carrying something. The logo on the back of the truck indicated it was Hardox. It said, "Hardox in my body."

I don't know what Hardox is, but it was brown, runny, and streaming out of the back at a rapid pace. If they wanted to keep claiming they had Hardox in their body, they needed to plug up those slits fast.

And those ... are my little surpises. I might ought to get back to beauties.