For lunch style protein, back in the day when my kids wouldn't eat sandwiches, I'd send jerky or a hunk of summer sausage. You need to be careful because of the sodium but both are high in protein, easy to pack and are particularly good for kids who generally aren't hungry at lunch.

We call local highways by their honorary names instead of the numbers, so instead of "94," it's "the Edens," which makes traffic reports difficult for nonresidents to interpret.

I still don't know what highways the honorary names correspond to. But then I generally don't listen to traffic reports.

Who among you thinks "one hundred and one" means 100.1?

o.0?

Chicagoans tend to throw "the" before grocery store names, as well as making the store names possessive. So, instead of "Jewel," we go to "the Jewel's." It's a thing.

Huh. Maybe that's where my MiL gets it from. Her mother's from Chicago, and she *was* born there (though raised in Texas).

Deep Lard Horizon: 250,000 gallons of beef fat spill in Houston Ship Channel

Over at Good.is: "Early Tuesday evening, approximately 250,000 gallons of beef fat spilled out of a shore-based storage tank owned by Jacob Stern & Sons, an agri-products company specializing in the resale of 'value-added oleochemicals.' Fifteen thousand gallons of the fat then found its way into the Houston Ship Channel through a storm drain."

If it was a check for $101 I would write it out as "one hundred one dollars" (if for some reason I was writing a check) but that's the only place where I'm careful about using "and" in numbers like that. I definitely wouldn't interpret "one hundred and one" to mean 100.1 in any context.

Well, maybe in the "listening to a crazy person who talks wrong" context.

If it was a check for $101 I would write it out as "one hundred one dollars" (if for some reason I was writing a check) but that's the only place where I'm careful about using "and" in numbers like that.

Why?

Why?

I think you're only supposed to use "and" for cents? Like "Four thousand three dollars and 23/100 cents."

Huh. Maybe that's where my MiL gets it from.

I wouldn't be surprised.

Mmmm, lunch ended up being vegetable lentil soup from the cafteria--very tasty! Not as much protein as I had hoped, but the idea of chicken salad yet again definitely did not appeal. They had fish tacos for the entree, and all that breading also didn't appeal.

We call local highways by their honorary names instead of the numbers, so instead of "94," it's "the Edens," which makes traffic reports difficult for nonresidents to interpret.

In NYC too, and it makes using my TomTom really annoying when I'm trying to leave town (which is almost the only time I use it anyway since I don't own a car). The worst is the Battery tunnel, which is "Battery Tunnel" to everyone who lives here and on all the signage, but 478 (or something) according to the GPS. So I'll be thinking to myself "Wait...478? I thought I was going through the tunnel...OH FUCK THAT'S THE EXIT!"