Holy Land: the best hummus and pita bread

Holy Land makes the best hummus and the best pita bread I've ever tasted. I already loved the hummus, and today I bought some pita bread to smear the hummus on, and I thought I had found vegan heaven. I've just bought their food at Cub Foods, but I'll have to check out their restaurant and store in Minneapolis.

My heart-felt recommendation for Minnesota company and its delicious food.

Happy Festivus!

It's a Festivus for the rest of us!

McDonald's in Wadena, MN

Why have a blog if you can't publicly complain about bad trips to stores and restaurants? Here's the email I sent to McDonald's.

On Sunday, December 21st, I stopped by the McDonald’s in Wadena, MN a little before 7:00 p.m. It was about 10 minutes before we were able to order, and then after ordering, it was 10-20 minutes before we got our food. But a long wait was only part of the problem.

While standing waiting for our food, another customer came to order, and explicitly said he had a large order. Yet he got all of his food and was out the door long before I got my food. I didn’t have a complicated order (two fries, a shake, an iced latte), so I didn’t really understand why a customer who came in long after I did got his food long before I did.

I did finally get my food, and I asked somebody an employee why a customer that came in after me got his food after I did. I did not get any real attention or concern, and certainly not an apology. The employee (who may have been a manager, I’m not sure) quickly gave a meaningless explanation then walked away.

Furthermore, my brother made an order that the employees in McDonald’s forgot. So he was standing there (with a very simply order: burger, fries, drink) waiting for an order that nobody was bothering to make. Many other customers were getting their orders while his order was forgotten about. And when he finally asked, he was told they lost/forgot his receipt, then quickly put together his order. They also did not apologize to him for the wait. In fact, at no point during this trip did any employee show any concern for us.

This was a day that we spend six hours in a car visiting people for Christmas. While I stood in McDonald’s for about a half an hour, my pregnant wife sat in the car and my two year old son cried. We thought we could stop and get a quick bite; we didn’t expect to add a half hour to our trip.

I will certainly never stop at the McDonald’s in Wadena again: the service was excessively slow and the employees were excessively indifferent. But in the future, if I want to stop and get something to eat, I’ll probably choose any other fast food restaurant over McDonald’s (which is probably best: my family is vegetarian, and while some other fast food restaurants offer sandwiches for vegetarians, McDonald’s does not). A long wait and poor treatment just isn’t worth it.

UPDATE: McDonalds' took effort to contact me and offer to rectify the situation. Thanks for the response.

"You can't handle the truth!"

In England, a teacher tells young children Santa Claus doesn't exist.  Hilarity ensues (The Guardian).

Children are supposed to slowly come to realize that they've been lied to by people they trust about something they care deeply about, that the magic they hope for doesn't exist.  Perhaps they're supposed to learn it from each other.  You're not supposed to just tell them!

Stupid Dialogue

PV: See!  House gets away with being scraggly and unshaven all the time!

PV's Wife:  You do too.

PV:  Oh yeah.

How The Office lost its way

Jim used to be the loser everyman that never got what he wanted.  So when he mocked everything around him, when he couldn't take anything or anybody seriously, when he acted like he was better than everything, it was endearing.  He was well suited to explore with us this silly, absurd world filled with its bizarre characters.

But now that Jim is with Pam and he's happy, it's not so fun to watch him act like he's better than everybody else.  Now, it's just smug.  Perhaps, too, we've learned more about the other characters in the office, and now that they're interesting and funny, it's not as fun to see somebody act like they are all beneath him.  But mostly, it's no longer a loser smugly and indifferently mocking everything around him.  Now it's a happy, contented person that just arrogantly acts like everybody around him is idiotic and small.  That's usually the character we dislike.

Or maybe it's just not as funny anymore.

Cheap Pop!

Target is running my favorite sale: five Pepsi products (12-packs of cans or 6-packs of bottles) for $15, then you get a $5 Target gift card.