8-16-13 Friday (Chili)

First I shall tell you about my new toy.  It’s the ChiliPad.  Basically a mattress pad with coils of water that runs through it.  You can heat or cool the pad.  I LOVE this thing.  We only got an XL Twin (half a king size) for me, for now.  Be it my fatness or my cholesterol meds or whatever else, I’m always ridiculously warm.  2 of my cholesterol meds have that side effect so who knows.  What I can tell you is that this pad rocks. Best investment so far.

Anyway, that’s my review of this device. 

Friday 8/17/13 Mom and Aunt Donna arrived today.  Tickets were a lot cheaper to fly them into Greenville, but that meant just shy of a 2 hour drive to pick them up.  Arrival time was supposed to be 1:55pm.  My aunt called to say that there was an hour delay.  It’s a good thing she called because I didn’t even think to check.  Mom and Aunt Donna were already at the airport in FL.  With that delay in mind, I went and checked the airport website who said it was on-time.  I then went to Allegiant’s website and it showed late.  I was at work and refreshed the page from time to time.  Another delay.  They weren’t going to arrive until 4:00.  I didn’t see them get off the plane until 4:30. 

The airport has metal birds hanging from the ceiling and since the place is under some sort of construction refurbishing, they dressed each bird in a construction outfit.  Complete with a mini hardhat, it was really cute.

It was 6:30ish when we got home.  Time for dinner.  We went to Union Street Bistro.  We’ve been there a few times.  This time they missed the mark.  Yes, it’s time for one of my bitchy, critical reviews.

We were looking at the menu when I said, “I think I’ll have the pork chop.”  My mom couldn’t find it on the menu so when I went to point it out on hers, it wasn’t there.  We realized I was the only one with a different menu.  We flagged down the hostess who was at her station only maybe 20 feet away.  She said that the menus had changed and wasn’t sure why some old ones got mixed in.  She took the 3 old ones, brought them to the podium and walked away.  We had to flag our server down to get 3 more.  Jim noticed some prices had went up, but they were still reasonable. 

The food.  Appetizers were good.  Mom had the Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo.  It was runny, flavorless and the chicken was overcooked.  I sampled it and agreed.  Jim had a stuffed fish of sorts and said it was good.  I had a pork chop.  It took a lot of work to cut that thing.  It was a little overcooked but I dealt with it.  The baked potato (hard to screw up) and veggies were fine.  Aunt Donna had a shrimp and artichoke dish.  The shrimp was tough.  She didn’t want to send it back.  We told the server and agreed that if they could just bring some fresh shrimp.  In the meantime we finished our meals and still no shrimp.  I spotted the server and said “we’re done with our meals and still no shrimp”.  She apologized saying the manager was involved.  I told her several times that it was terrible that a 2-3 minute cook-time shrimp would take so long.  A Manager came over with the shrimp, apologized and offered to comp the meal but we had a Groupon so he gave us 2 desserts. I never mentioned the fettuccine or the pork chop.

We’ll have to think twice about a return visit there.

Tomorrow we have a BYOB painting class!