My buddy Il is moving in with his girlfriend (fiancée now!) and is getting new Comcast service at his house. He scheduled everything to happen at once, so he asked for help waiting for the cable guy. I hate waiting, whether its for a cable guy, a delivery guy, or for a repair guy. It usually drives me nuts. But it’s Il, so I got up early, drove to a sketchy neighborhood, and waited in a mostly empty house for two hours and the cable guy never showed up. Turns out it was scheduled for NEXT MONTH. Bah.

But I did get the lawn mowed, and I went to get my mom’s car washed. Well, the car grows some kind of lichen like most cars that sit around in Oregon, and it cost extra to get it washed and waxed ($80!) And it took extra time, which meant I had something else I had to wait for today.

Honestly, I ended up playing games (The Heist and Whirly Word) on my iPhone for all the time I was waiting and the only thing that really suffered was my eyesight.

I did go out to dinner to somewhere new, the NW Public House, and it turned out to be tasty and fairly nice. Unfortunately my neighborhood is a bit upscale to begin with, and a “fairly nice” restaurant is also a good place to go on a first date. That means whenever I’m at a fairly nice restaurant in my neighborhood by myself, it’s likely that I’m going to sit next to a first date with all the nonsense awkward conversation that goes along with it. I need to stick to dive bars with the retirees who all seem to know me from the neighborhood.

Dinner was good, but the portions were tiny. Fortunately, that put me near “Salt and Straw”, a hipster ice cream parlor with lines going out the door. My Lavender & Honey + Honey Balsamic Strawberry with Cracked Pepper cone was great. I’d even stand in line for it again.