home again, home again

 Well it was an excellent trip. The first time I have been out of town in almost two years.  You know there is a thing about hunkering down where it is just kind of easy.  So much easier to just stay home and do the same thing every day, no need to pack, no need to worry about when the train is going to leave and if it will get stalled Kankakee for an hour or so.  But when  you take a trip it is something you can remember when you are out puttering around in your garden whereas you never remember all those Tuesday nights watching Portlandia on Netflix.  And there is this thing about being old where you wonder if you should be gallivanting around at your advanced age.

But like I said, it was an excellent trip, the people on the train, in the bar, in other bars, at the restaurants, and at the party were all jolly, and if you talked to them they would comment on how jolly everybody was and then one of you would observe, "Well I think it is just pent up merry making after that long pandemic, which as plain as the nose on your face it certainly was.  There was the original panic, the long slog of just not going anywhere, the dull worry that maybe the idiot on the train with his mask below his neck was shedding covid and in a week you might end up at the other end of one of those awful machines dead to the world. and a fifty/fifty chance you would remain that way forever.  Hopefully we are at the end of that road, though recent delta developments are worrisome.  My covid website seems to have stopped at July 2nd, but it was just beginning to rise a bit after a long plateau.

I really didn't know where the Mackinac bridge was and I guess I assume that living there at the tippy top of Michigan I think that if you just happen to make a wrong turn on the way to the drugstore you might find yourself eating your bacon round.

For a long time the House of Chin would not accept credit cards, and George, the owner, confessed to me once that he kept two sets of books for purposes of avoiding taxes and did not want the feds to be able to trace how much he was making.  That is another reason people want to go cashless, to make people pay their taxes, also how can you bribe you congressman with a credit card?

A lot of places want the server to share their tips with the busboys and the cooks, and if the waiter gets a cash tip it is no problem to slip a few bills into his pocket and not share them.  But also I guess if the restaurant is putting all the tips in one pile and divvying them up they could shave a little bit of that off for themselves also.

I guess I forgot that I had presented that Val story previously.  I will start the next one long the next time I post because I am still catching up on things.