Exactly how much stuff does it take for a road trip when I decide to take my DSLR?

Every Tuesday we eat the same thing.  This is our way of simplifying.  We have 3 nights a week when we always eat the same thing.  Or, as close to the same thing as a given restaurant gets.  It always surprises me how much variability there can be from one week to the next between the way a meal is made.

There are times I like surprises and then there are times I want my food to be utterly predictable.  Food items like pizza should be predictable, in my opinion.  I have never picked a favorite pizza joint on the basis of how frequently the way the pizza tastes changes.  Yet, one of the things that probably keeps us from getting bored with our eating routine is that we cannot predict how the pizza will taste or how the sushi will be prepared from one week to the next.

This is especially true of the pizza.  We usually eat Mellow Mushroom pizza having not found a mom and pop shop that we like yet.  We like Mellow Mushroom pizza about half the time.  The other half, it’s either over cooked, under cooked, or cold.  I’ve always wanted to be a fly on the wall in the kitchen to figure out exactly what goes wrong half the time.

Food art at a nice restaurant on the road–a far cry from the sushi

Our Tuesday night choice is not pizza, however.  It’s the Rice Boxx.  This is a Chinese/Thai/Japanese place that has decent Chinese and sushi.  I have found a couple of dishes I like, but I tire of them quickly.  I have been ordering 1 shrimp tempura and 1 sweet potato roll every Tuesday night for months.  The sushi is OK, but once again unpredictable.  The thing that is predictable is that there will always be a surprise in the fortune cookies.

Sometimes it’s a missing fortune.  Sometimes it’s a fortune that is a weather forecast instead of a fortune.  Sometimes it’s the cookies themselves, which go from thicker to thiner styles and back again yet always come in the same wrapper.

On this particular Tuesday night, I was running around like a mad woman trying to pack for a road trip.  I had decided at the last minute, after working late, to leave that night instead of the next morning so I could avoid hitting Knoxville during the morning rush hour.  Pat went and picked up our food without me so I could finish packing.

I stopped running around like a mad woman long enough to sit down to eat when Pat returned.  There was a new sushi chef and he made the sushi smaller and tighter, making it easier to get the pieces in my mouth without making a mess.  When I finished my sushi, I opened up my fortune cookie, already smiling with anticipation as I tore open the wrapper.

Does this really count as a fortune?

This is what it said:  “An alien of some sort will be appearing to your shortly.”  I keep watching out for bright lights in the sky, but so far, nothing.