June 08, 2007 | Where an Empty Stomach has Adverse Affects on My Brain
Having lived in the bay area pretty much my entire life, I think I can safely say that I know my way around. I know how the traffic works, and I can usually navigate a route from point A to point B that will induce the least amount of swearing loudly at other drivers. It's almost like there's a little map of the area implanted in my brain. However, in the past few days it has become clear that I've lost my touch.
Wednesday night, we decided to take our out of town visitor to Tony Roma's for ribs (the explanation for this involves me telling another story completely). We chose the location in Union City so Seth and Casey could meet us there without having to suffer in traffic too much. I had a general idea of the Tony Roma's location, but decided to look up driving directions anyways. I figured we'd mostly need them for when we got closer to the restaurant, but decided we might as well follow them almost all the way. If you've ever had to take 237 East to get to 880, you know that this was THE WORST IDEA EVER. Our total driving time should have been half an hour. I think that's how long it took to merge on to the freaking 880. If I had looked at the little Google generated map before we left, it might have actually donned on me to take 101 to the Dumbarton bridge so we would have missed the 237/880 interchange madness. Hindsight and 50/50 and all that.
Today, wasn't quite as bad, but did cause me a brief DOH! moment. I made plans to meet the Favorite Cousin for lunch, which meant driving across town. My work is located close to several different freeways, and at 11:30am on a Friday taking any of them would have been a perfectly logical choice. What do I do? I wind my way over to the stop light riddled expressway and arrive 10 minutes later than I could have. The freeway option doesn't occur to me until I'm half way there.
As both of the destinations on these incidents have involved food, perhaps I can blame these lapses in judgement on hunger?
Speaking of food, I'm planning on making this for dinner tonight. I'm probably more excited about it than I should be.
i know what you mean about driving around here! i always try to take 280... because driving on 101 will give me hives!
Deb, this recipe was everything I hoped it would be. The anti-noodle boyfriend was even a good sport about the cellophane noodles. Also, I used pork loin chops instead of a tenderloin, and they seemed to work just fine.
I hope you love it. We've made it THREE times now. I seriously have been having trouble cooking new things, because I just want to eat noodles and pork and mango.