Recently in Humor Category
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze."
So here's the deal. Every year my wife and I agree to a loose spending limit on gifts for each other, and every year she exceeds that limit (or at least spends more than I spend on her). I was determined to not let that happen this year so I bought her a GPS Navigation system--something far more expensive than our usual gifts. The wrapped present under the fake tree with my name was heavy but too big to be what I really wanted...an iPhone. I watched her open the GPS system with unabashed cockiness that I'd finally outdone her on our presents to each other. Opening my gift was practically an afterthought. It turns out the big heavy box had another wrapped box inside along with some stuff to make it heavier. Inside that box rested yet another. I was resigned to opening box after box until a small envelope or something when I sat staring at the impossible. She got me the iPhone. Talk about inner conflict. I was elated to finally have the iPhone and yet crushed that she'd pulled an end-run and beat me yet again. Sorry for the lack of posts for the past few weeks, but life has been a wild ride since Rudy died. We sold our house, packed our house, and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment 30 miles away. Meanwhile, the semester was coming to an end (this is finals week). In any case, we're settled into the 703 square-feet upstairs unit that we'll call home for the next six months or so.
Part of moving to a new area is discovering its culinary offerings. It turns out that Woodbridge has just about every restaurant you can imagine--as long as your imagination is constrained by chain restaurants. Seriously, it's an urbanite's nightmare. One of the small handful of mom-and-pop type pizza places is a take-n-bake that was written up favorably in the Washington Post. It's located just down the street from us so I swung by to pick up a pie to cook in our new place (in a brand-new oven, I might add).
I was greeted nicely enough at Papa Petrone's Take 'N Bake by a thin, gray-haired, nimble man who quickly approached the counter from the back of the store. When I asked if they had salami as a topping (which at that point I could see was not on their menu) he quickly replied "no." He asked me in a cocky tone, "Where you from?" I looked up from the menu flier and said, "California originally." He squinted and looked at me like he was Philip Baker Hall and fired, "Californians don't know shit about pizza." Stunned, I chuckled and said, "Well I don't know about that, but no one seems to have salami any more." I proceeded to place my order (pepperoni, mushroom, and black olives for the curious) without incident.
I kept replaying the conversation in my head the entire way home, laughing harder with each time. Cynthia laughed hard for a while, too. Evidently salami is a taboo topping at Papa Petrone's.
