Random Thoughts: Lunching Around Town, The Trouble With The 545, and the Great Boysenberry Conspiracy

Lately my two sisters have decided to make a habit of posting daily on their respective Blogs, which has the slightly annoying effect of making me look like just a bit of a freakin’ slacker over here with my recent pace of one or two posts a week.  To be fair, they do have kids, husbands and all kinds of other stuff to Blog about on a regular basis while I’ve managed to persist in being chronically single and thoroughly predictable in my day-to-day existence, but a bit of catching up might do me some good, so here are a few random thoughts from the past week or so:

• As my short-term stint of working in downtown Seattle continues to become increasingly less short-term (something that I am definitely not complaining about, it’s worked out really well for me,) I’ve been trying to branch out a bit and try different places for lunch as much as possible.  Not that I consider myself to be a foodie (or anything resembling one, for that matter,) and not that I have anything against chain restaurants, but with all the different places to eat near where  work, it never hurts to try different things, right?  I haven’t ventured far into the International District yet, but the place I’m working currently is moving over to a location much closer to there than to the other places I’ve been eating at, and if I don’t want to spend half my lunch hour walking to and from somewhere, I’ll probably need to consider heading in that direction.  Fortunately, a group of people far braver than myself have undertaken the task of eating at every restaurant in the International District, reviewing them, and posting the results on a Blog as the MSG150.  I’m not quite sure where I was going with this, but I just wanted to make sure I got a plug in for them, since I’ve already managed to get some good recommendations.

 

• Although I’ve enjoyed working in downtown, I’m pretty sure I’ve already managed to complain about the annoyances of bus riding here once before.  Unfortunately, this situation hasn’t been getting better, as I’ve been finding for the past couple of weeks that it’s been taking upwards of an hour for me to get home from work on the 545 bus to Redmond, with as much as half of that time spent in the construction-addled traffic mess on Fourth Avenue.  Although people like to tout things such as eco-friendliness, use of the carpool lanes and other such highminded ideals as their reasons for riding the bus (at least that’s what the people in the ads on the side of the bus seem to be doing,) I suspect that for the vast majority of bus riders in downtown Seattle, there’s one reason to ride the bus, and that’s avoiding the cost of parking.  As it stands right now, it generally costs me $5 a day to ride the bus ($2.50 each way,) or $11 a day to park in downtown near my workplace, plus a couple of bucks worth of gas to get back and forth (let’s just call it $3, although I’m not sure what the actual cost would be.)  No matter how bad the traffic is on Fourth Avenue, if I’m taking the bus it has no choice but to slog right through the mess, plus whatever subsequent messes happen to be on I-5 or 520.  If I take my own car, I can skip the whole thing, take I-90 across the lake (generally a whole lot better than 520 from a traffic perspective) enjoy the amenities that my car has to offer along the way, and actually get home in a reasonable amount of time.  Given these two choices, is it really worth spending an hour sitting bored in traffic to save eight bucks?  I’m starting to wonder about that one…

 

• Why is it that you only ever see Boysenberry flavored pancake syrup in pancake restaurants?  Is there some sort of law about that?  And speaking of pancakes, I’ve learned by unfortunate experience that they generally make a really lousy dinner.  It’s one of those things where deep down in your heart you know better, but you do it anyway.  Sure, you could probably make perfectly reasonable pancakes at home, but the thought of those exotic syrup flavors makes that vaguely syrup-flavored artificial glop that gets passed off as the standard-issue syrup these days pale in comparison.  Thus lacking the proper motivation for the task at hand, you head for the nearest restaurant and order up a stack of pancakes.  In the end, disappointment always ensues.  Although the meals these places usually serve up would make a passable breakfast, ordering pancakes for dinner always seems to end up a regrettable decision.  Before you know it, you start to feel like you’ve just paid eight bucks (plus a tip) for dessert, and forgot to eat dinner beforehand.  You just HAD to go for the Boysenberry syrup, didn’t you?  I’m starting to think this whole thing is one big conspiracy by the pancake restaurants to keep Boysenberry off the grocer’s shelves so people have to go to the restaurants for it.  After all, it’s not like they’re actually going for the pancakes, right?

 

• I should probably note that the entire previous paragraph is rendered null and void by the fact that most stores here actually carry Boysenberry flavored pancake  syrup if I could be bothered to look for it on the shelf, but why let a perfectly good rant go to waste?