yayyayayayayayayayayayay to Tom and Nora!!! That is so freaking exciting!!!

Crossed fingers for ita and Jesse.

Why, oh why, did I try to engage civilly with the craxy people on the Internet?

Oh, punkin, it's the teacher in you. You're trying to have a teachable moment with the craxies.

Now I want a black bean burger and sweet potato fries.

Now I do, too! And I don't know where I can get both in the same restaurant. First world problems, I can haz.

Yay for Nora and Tom!!!

And I finally got my taxes filed, which was an adventure simply due to the fact that I needed a PIN to file my Illinois taxes, and their online retrieval site is down "for maintenance" and their phone line was tied up for nearly 30 minutes before I could get through. That's what I get for waiting until the 15th to file, I guess!

Now I just have to transfer money into my checking account to cover the payments...

Yay Nora and Tom! That's wonderful news!

Congratulations, Nora & Tom!!!!

Tuna salad has celery, onions, hard boiled egg, and as little mayonaise as possible to glue it together.

Egg salad has mustard, sweet relish, and minimal mayo.

Last time I made it I didn't have relish so I used Branston Pickle. It tasted soooooo good but it makes the egg salad oddly brown -- so close the sammich quickly.

TOM GOT A JOB OFFER IN NEW ORLEANS

Game changer! Superexciting life changing whoa!

Almost diametrically opposite the last two hours I spent at the DMV where (a) I'd forgotten about how much the tax is on the title change (answer: hundreds) and (b) the title transfer was misdated "5/14" instead of "4/14" and since it's a legal document I now have to go back to the guy who sold it and get him to give me a bill of sale. Which he is happy to do, and it's around the corner from Emmett's Krav lesson. Still, I wanted the transfer through so we could get the local parking sticker and be done with the bureaublahblah.

OTOH...New Orleans!

Hamburgers can have any wild combination of toppings. They are the little black dress of the fast food world and you change 'em up for day or evening with various accessories.

Dirty water dogs are best with ketchup, mustard, relish, and kraut or mustard and onions. Other dogs varry hamburgedly.

Fries get ketchup. Or they get condiment roulette as well. Salt and vinegar is a favorite. So is mayo and sweet chili sauce. Disco fries are om nom.

When I was in the UK I was teased about American's eating ketchup on everything, oh hah hah hah. Then I tasted their ketchup (which I had to pay 5p a pack for. the fuck?) and understood why I was being mocked - their ketchup tasted like crap. No WONDER they thought we were nuts, they don't know from ketchup.

The statistic that Americans now eat more salsa than ketchup is redic. Who the hell sits down to watch a movie and kills an entire bottle of ketchup? Besides, most commercial American salsa is just chunky ketchup anyways.

Congratulations, Tom and Nora!

Burgers: at least ketchup, mustard (ideally spicy), and either pickles or relish. I also like bacon, cheese, lettuce, and (when locally available) tomatoes.

Hot dogs: chili and onions. Or ketchup, mustard, and relish.

Tuna salad: tuna, celery, onion, mayo and nothing else.

Egg salad: hard boiled eggs, celery, onion, mayo, and mustard.

Fries: ketchup or aioli.

That is so exciting, Nora and Tom! What is the job? Nora, how far is your house from Boston?

In the book Fast Food Nation while every other fast food chain was ripped for its horrible nutrition and methods, In 'N Out burgers was put forth as a proper model for fast food.

They use all fresh ingredients for one thing. You can watch them cutting up the fries from actual potatoes while you're standing in line. Anyway, it's pretty straightforward but it's fresh and well made and cheap. Also they taste really good. Much better than any other chain burger I've had.

The other thing about this burger joint is that they pay good wages and have benefits (good wages for fast food). When they opened the one near Pier 39 a few years back, the starting rate of pay was something like $11 per hour; lines were around the block to apply for a job.

Have we discussed this "nice guys" article here? [link] Aside from the myriad other issues with it (like, it's an article about what women want with only one quote from an actual woman, way down at the end of the article), this part is really puzzling me:

Neil Strauss, author of the "The Game," a best-seller that explores ways for men to pick up women, once found himself in the Mr. Nice Guy category. He was friends with a girl he liked. He was painting her walls one time when she left to go on a date with another guy. Strauss quickly figured out that women desire someone who is kind but also has a backbone and is confident.

So he's friends with a woman, wants to be more than friends, and doesn't tell her this. And then, when she goes out with other guys, he blames the fact that he helped her paint her apartment? If a guy friend offered to help me paint my apartment or something like that, it would never occur to me to interpret it as him wanting to date me. The lesson I'm getting from this isn't "Women don't want to date guys who are too nice," but "Women aren't mind readers."