One thing you just have to love is Memorial Day weekend. People come in and buy hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, and beer. And some people are nice to their dedicated Wal-Mart cashiers who have to work the entire holiday weekend, while they’re eating and boozing it up. And then some people are crabby. The crabby ones are the ones you just want to strangle, because they make an unpleasant weekend even worse. Add to that the fact that I have a crummy schedule for the next three bloody weeks, and it’s just not fun. I have NO early mornings all three of these weeks. The earliest I come in is 9 AM. My usual schedule is coming in at seven, and out by four.
Otherwise, my birthday is this Tuesday. This year, I’m taking it kind of nonchalantly. No huge celebrations, but then again, I’m not rebelling against it this year like I did in 2005, where I wanted nothing to do with it at all. The only celebrating that I want is to go to dinner, and I haven’t even picked the restaurant yet.
I do know one thing, though – it’s not going to be T-Bone Jacks in Waynesboro. There was a fire there in the wee hours of Saturday morning, which basically gutted the place, and caused the roof to collapse in one place. They say it’s not arson, according to news reports. They say it started as an electrical fire in a back office. Most you can see from Lew Dewitt Boulevard is yellow caution tape all around the building and lots of smoke damage. Smoke seems to have come out of every possible opening based on the marks on the building. It even came out in between the individual sections of wood on the side. I figure when you consider the damage to the building, they’ll probably demolish the building and rebuild at the same location. I just hope they had insurance.
T-Bone Jacks was located in the former Western Sizzlin building, which closed on Christmas Eve, 2004. And it’s funny… fire seems to be the usual fate of former Western Sizzlin locations in this area. The Western Sizzlin in Staunton closed in the mid-1990s and was converted to a Texas Steakhouse. Not all that long after they opened, the restaurant was torched after someone allegedly looted the restaurant’s safe. The building was pretty much destroyed, so they demolished the old building, and built a new building on the same site. And the new building looked like a Texas Steakhouse should look, rather than a converted Western Sizzlin. Hopefully, if T-Bone Jacks builds a new building, it will look just as good.
Still, I’ll keep you posted about what happens with my birthday and dinner. I am, though, keeping firm with my “no cake” request once again. Not for not celebrating, though, but rather because I’m really watching what I eat. Cakes have WAY too much sugar. It would be really nice to slim down even more, to the point of risking a loss of pants again at work. Yes, it would be embarrassing, but I’d be proud of it for the whole weight-loss thing.