Dave's Thoughts of the Day: August 2nd

Be yourself!  It's great to be yourself, and don't worry about how people think all the time.  If you're decent and honest, just being yourself is a great way to go.   Remember, if don't be yourself, you will be someone else.

Great news!  The peaches at the store went down from $1.99 a pound to $1.50.  Do the dance!   I packed a bunch of em last night.  AND I got two spicy italian sausage links fresh from the meat counter.

I went over to the apartment and used the gas grill we have to cook the sausages.   The web articles said to cook them for 25 minutes but Coach, my room mate, said "Don't do that!  You'll burn them."

Coach knew what he was talking about, folks.   I kept rotating them on a 4 minute interval and even on low heat, they were done in just 15 minutes.  They may have been a touch overcooked even: some of the juices escaped and they were a touch dry.

VERY GOOD though.  It was so fresh you could even taste the freshness of the seasonings within the sausage... as if they were freshly minced and added into each link.

Also at the grocery store they had a GREAT special on Stag Chili... $1.66 per can... There was no way I was saying "no."  I got five cans for the next week or so.

If that wasn't enough, I also assembled ingredients for my own Pop Tart Ice Cream Sandwich. A box of frosted strawberry pop tarts (I stood there for five minutes debating whether to get the frosted or unfrosted version, then I got the frosted ones, went home, and saw the Pop Tart Sandwich Commercial from Carl's and I was proven right -- frosted).  Then I got a pint of vanilla ice cream.  I didn't want to get very much because I knew nobody else would eat it.   It was quite a haul my friends.   Good ice cream, snacks, and groceries.

Did you know a Pop Tart has 200 calories?  TWO HUNDRED for a wimpy lil pop tart.   I'll have to save my Pop Tart Ice Cream Sandwich night for another time.  Probably Sunday.

People must think I'm nuts with all the fruit I buy each week.  I get apples, oranges, plums, peaches, and others depending on the day and the season.   Usually I get two or three kinds of fruit, roughly two pounds each.

I've been stalling on grapes despite the grapes looking very good AND being well priced.  I believe it was 3 bones a pound at present, but I still didn't have the wherewithall to go after it.  Terrible job by me.   Good grapes are fleeting -- suddenly you turn around and it's those withered soggy ones again.   I'll be more careful next time.

I like fruit.  You know what makes fruit work?  You get all sorts of vitamins and dietary fiber *and* it tastes so good.  I am utterly shocked how little the rest of America eats fruit.   I hardly ever see coach eat more than one apple for his lunch at work.  My older sister doesn't eat much fruit at *all*.   When I go to her apartment she only has a few apples.

I grant you that some of them are tedious to prepare:  pineapple, watermelon, and several others.  It's a lot of work to get to your food.   The others -- apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, kiwi, and whatever else is out there, are the best.   A quick wash, maybe some peeling or slicing but you're good to go within 90 seconds.

I don't, with rare exception, see my buddies eat fruit much, although that's not fair to evaluate since most of my fruit eating is at home, to pose an example.  People moan about us not eating enough vegetables either, and they're right, but fortunately I am somewhat healthier with the fruit I select each day to eat.  Huge fan.

If I were to hit the jackpot, like, say, I won 1000 bones on a game show, I'd like to take some of that, go to the store, and buy at least one of every fruit available at the produce section.   I'd go a little extra with the peaches.   The regular ones, the organically grown ones, let's go hog wild.

Some folks do what they call an "apple cleanse".   It's just a way to eat fiber high, low fat food to push out all the gunk in your intestines.  Keen idea.  It brings up the point that sometimes people have a cleanse like diet for a day without realizing it!   Those days will come where one doesn't eat any meat whatsoever!   Didn't happen today -- I went to Five Guys for lunch.

Five Guys was gooooooooooood, but did you all notice they reformatted the fries menu?  Now they offer a smallER small sized fries, a medium sized fries, and the original large fries.   They used to just have a very large sized small and an enormously sized large fries there.   What a cop out!   It's like they're trying to save a few pennies so they added the flexibility so that they don't have to give out as many fries.

Some of you may think ARod is the biggest fraud in America right now.  I say not!  The biggest sham going is the Monopoly Game at McDonald's.  Every year we get the game... all right it's fun, and most of us figured out the ruse by now, but let's put it out there:  they always let you get the first two properties in a specific colored group ie the purple properties, the blue properties and so on.   Just about anyone can get the first two of three properties and get all their hopes up, but good luck finding the third!  You have better luck throwing a q tip into the middle of a landfill in *Topeka* and challenging someone to find it!  The best prizes in the Monopoly game are the instant winners.  NOBODY wins those big property matching prizes, so you're really after the insta-foods aka $5 arch card, quarter pounder, free fries, and so on.

The McDonald's Monopoly game has been going on for a really long time -- 20 years now?  Pretty close to that!

When "Grande" isn't really grande... that's called the Starbucks Menu.

My buddy teased a california burrito place somewhere in the vicinity of Westwood.. I should have told him about Burrito King on Sunset!  That was LEGIT... I bet he'd really like it, especially w/ the little red sauce.

If someone gave me a lump sum of money to live in San Francisco for a year, I would take it immediately.  Wonderful place to live, although it has its shades of sketchy... way more overt unavoidable sketch than other cities, but that honesty is part of the charm too.  Get into it!

And!  My buddy Jacob Rosales lives there.   We could scour all of SF's hottest bars for all of SF's hottest women.

Give me a "T!"  Give me an "A!"  What's it spell????  "AT!!!!"

Geez... you know what?  I'm being a complete loon but next weekend I might want to just take the plunge and go to a Giants Baseball game up north.  It's complete idiocy to do this, but despite the expense I'd love to try that out.  Maybe Jacob would be up for it too... I can finally eat that "Sheboigan" he's touted for so many years.

GOOD STUFF!  All right, everyone, that's the word for Friday.  Have a good weekend everyone!