I’m great in bed

on friday the old/former neighbor mentioned in this post needed some help with stuff, and afterward he offered to buy us dinner. we let him decide the restaurant, it was 8pm by that time & i thought be might end up at a burger place. but he chose to go to red lobster.

first, of all it was so dimly lit. like, i've had better lighting with a couple of candles during a power outage. my brother & i went a couple of times with our parents before long ago, but that was during the afternoon & we could see better. i had a hard time reading the menu because of how the dim the over the table light was.

got root beer to drink. it's supposed to be mug brand, but didn't taste the same as the mug from taco bell. my brother figures it was watered down.
had a couple of the cheddar bay biscuits. which were flavorful, but dry & i could never favor them in the red lobster vs. olive garden bread sticks debate. although, i don't think i've been to olive garden to try the bread sticks.
i went to the bathroom afterwards to wash my hands because of the butter topping from the biscuits. i only use public bathroom soap sparingly on my fingers, because it make the backs of my hands break out in weird, itchy bumps. the label on the dispensers said safeguard & whatever it was smelled a bit like a perm.

my brother got the grilled lobster, shrimp and salmon with a baked potato and orzo rice. he could not get any meat from the lobster tail, it was basically flatted in the grilling process. everything was on a large bed of the orzo rice. which was kind of nice, in terms of the amount of food overall. he didn't finish it & brought the leftovers back and had them for lunch. where he was more successful with eating the lobster tail.

i got the admiral's feast with seasoned broccoli and mashed potatoes. they bring it out on a huge tin tray of some sort & it didn't look like much of a "feast". the former neighbor asked if i had gotten an appetizer & i said it sure looked like it. i got 4 shrimp, a handful of fried clam strips, another of fried bay scallops & a piece of fried, breaded flounder cut in half. the sides of seasoned broccoli and mashed potatoes were on a a separate plate, literally to the side.
the picture online (i know they're all BS) shows a full tray with all of that, but 5 pieces of shrimp & 2 pieces of flounder plus optional fries. they'd be better off having it on one of the oval plates/patters, that way it would looked like you got more. and save the tin tray for the 1 pound of snow crab legs and stuff like that.

overall, it was not horrible. just a bit disappointing.

the company that mows the grass here started their weekly cutting today. while it's technically spring, it has been mostly on the cooler side lately. but, i suppose the bouts of rain and those days with 70-ish degree temperatures lately were enough for it to grow some. but you could not prove it by me, because other than some tufts of grass by the buildings it didn't look like it grew at all.
especially since at the end of the cutting season last year there was a 3-4 week period with little to no rain & a 1/3 to 1/2 of the grass looked dead.

what they really need to do here is to cut back some bushes they have near the road in a few places. the last time they were trimmed was about 5 years ago & they desperately need it.
they're hard to see around, which makes things dangerous for anyone crossing the road near them. they're starting to encroach a bit on the sidewalks that they're next too. and i'm pretty sure if they get much bigger they might qualify as trees.

the rest of the title is; The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone

from amazon;

The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous objects in the world, attracting millions of visitors to the British museum every year, and yet most people don’t really know what it is. Discovered in a pile of rubble in 1799, this slab of stone proved to be the key to unlocking a lost language that baffled scholars for centuries.

Carved in ancient Egypt, the Rosetta Stone carried the same message in different languages—in Greek using Greek letters, and in Egyptian using picture-writing called hieroglyphs. Until its discovery, no one in the world knew how to read the hieroglyphs that covered every temple and text and statue in Egypt.

Dominating the world for thirty centuries, ancient Egypt was the mightiest empire the world had ever known, yet everything about it—the pyramids, mummies, the Sphinx—was shrouded in mystery. Whoever was able to decipher the Rosetta Stone would solve that mystery and fling open a door that had been locked for two thousand years.

Two brilliant rivals set out to win that prize. One was English, the other French, at a time when England and France were enemies and the world’s two great superpowers.

this is the first book i read in 2025.
it was pretty interesting, going into how the rosetta stone was found, plus some history of ancient egypt that lead to it's creation.
it also goes a bit into written language in general & how hard it is to figure out if you have no frame of reference for it. are the signs/symbols words? sounds? letters? and is it read from left to right? right to left? top to bottom?
there are still some written languages no one knows how to read in this day & age. probably the most well known is Linear A. but there's also the written language of the Etruscans (a.k.a the nearby civilization that early ancient rome stole nearly every concept & idea from). as well as the written language of the Rapa Nui, the people of easter island.

my brother wondered who decided on the "correct" written words for things?
like; one man said this collection of lines means "rock". but another man said no; his collection of lines means "rock". then they started fighting, throwing rocks at each other, & killing each other. a third guy comes along & says this collection of lines means "rock" & everyone went along with it.

so my paid time expires on the 15^th & i was doing the usual thing of wondering what icons i'd get when i'm limited to 15 (did you hear livejournal is up to 30 icons for free accounts now?) like i always do when faced with my paid account expiring. but because of some generous donations (thanks!) i can get another 6 months.

i was going to wait until after the first of the year or closer to 3-sentence fic time (it has it's own community now threesentenceficathon ) but then realized annual the end-of-year points bonus deal will be in december, so i should do it then. that would provide icons for whatever i do for the fic-a-thon & if i buy it late enough in the month the account expire after my birthday in early june. if i mathed that right, i don't know.

if you're not subscribed to dw_news (you should be, to get the latest DW info), read more about the end-of-year points bonus in last year's announcement post.

back in july i posed about a very disappointing meal at sonic drive-in. today we had fast food for the first time since then.

we went to wendy's* mainly because we had a coupon. my brother used the coupon to get the big bacon classic combo, with a chili cheese potato instead of fries (he doesn't like fries, except arby's seasoned & 1 convenience store's) & i got the jr. bacon cheeseburger biggie bag deal.

my burger wasn't bad, the bacon was crispy & it had a good amounts of condiments and stuff. however my fries were almost, but not, quite soggy in the middle, although they did taste OK. the nuggets were OK, but honey mustard dip tasted like cheap honey mustard dressing (since i do get that from wal-mart now & then, i know the flavor).
i got sweet tea, which was too sweet & i had to dilute it with unsweetened (this usually happens with i get sweet tea from fast food places).

my brother liked his burger well enough, but the bun fell apart. he liked the chili cheese potato (which had some cheese as well as cheese sauce) but the chili didn't appear to have much meat (our theory is someone didn't scoop from the bottom of the pot & just dipped the ladle in quickly).
he got coke from the freestyle machine & thought it was OK. he tried coke with cream soda (or something) but couldn't taste the cream.

this location was remodeled last year & they moved the freestyle machine to be closer to where you order & that creates traffic issues with people coming in to order, or pick up their orders from the order shelves.
they got a new freestyle machine, which is good. but instead of a button to dispense the drink they have a small touchscreen thing. don't know why.

overall it was much better than sonic. cheaper too, with the coupon & biggie bag deal.



*we were suppose to go in june for breakfast for my birthday but the dining room wasn't open.

in june i made a post about some health thing i was experiencing. well, since then i've had a procedure to help mitigate that. tests on certain things are negative, which is good. plus a medication that is supposed to help future issues.

but i worry about side effects. it's not even been a week of taking it, but every odd feeling & pain could be one and it's worrying as well as a bit annoying. like, the random things a body feels/experiences in a given day should not want me to call my healthcare provider to see if they're anything to be concerned about.

went to wal-mart on monday & they had so much back to school* stuff out already. it was starting to creep in before that though. and it used to be that kind of stuff didn't come out until at least late july. school starts the last monday (used to be the last tuesday) of august here.
my brother said for years after high school he'd start panicking when he saw the back to school stuff. because; 1. he (both of us, really) had such a stressful time in school, and 2. that meant there was less time to get the stuff needed for school.

they also had a small display of candy corn. and that really is way too early. personally, i think the first week of september is a reasonable time to start doing that.
when the last of reese's peanut butter eggs from easter were eaten my brother said; "in july they will have the PB pumpkins." and he may not be that far off.



*they also have "back to dorm" stuff, but that's just part of back to school. imho.

In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies – often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.

Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.

This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.

this is a sad book, but not too sad (in my opinion). ( spoiler )

what struck me is how some things don't change. when HIV/AIDS was really getting national attention guys were saying "it's the gay men in san francisco that are getting it. it's not here in the mid-west." it reminded me of the early days of COVID. "it's in the cities. not here in rural areas." or monkeypox; "it's only gay men that get that."

the wikipedia entry on RCB says this was was going to be adapted into a movie, or TV series, in 2020 & it would be called the book of ruth. but there are like 3 movies called that already.

i started reading my first ebook yesterday via that library in the big city in the eastern part of the state. it's the incense game by laura joh rowland, a title that has been on my booklender list for ages.

it was easier then i thought to open it (i guess that's the term) & get started. i'm just reading in on my laptop in a browser. they have options for kindle, downloading EPUBs or PRFs if you have libby.

and it picked up where i left off yesterday when i got back into it today, which is good.

people who type intact as in tact.

granted, if you've only heard the word spoken you probably didn't realize that it's one word & not two. or maybe the culprit is predictive text?

i'm trying not to become one of those people that have to correct someone's spelling or word usage. it's just some things make me twitch.