Iggy's

I am not unlike many of my peers in the fact that a large portion of my budget goes to food and eating out. It is one of my main "extra" expenses that comes out of every month's paychecks. However, when I pay a totaled $12 for a mediocre lunch while killing time between obligations during the day, that does not fly with me.

While driving around town today I had a place in mind for a cheap lunch, but when I got there, I found out they weren't opening for another half hour, so I went into their neighboring restaurant, Iggy's Sports Grill instead. I've always liked the ambiance of that place. The layout is open and friendly and they have the perfect balance of interior design - not a chaotic mess of decorations on the wall, like some popular chains. I quickly ordered a BLT and strawberry lemonade and quickly my meal was delivered, since the place had just opened and not a lot of people were in there at the time. For this I am thankful. I barely got done eating my slice of bread (dipped in their unique sweet/tangy sauce) before my sandwich arrived, and that's much preferable to waiting half an hour.

$6.95 got me two pieces of bread, shredded lettuce, bacon, and tomatoes, along with a large side of fries and a very tiny cup of coleslaw. Oh, and a pickle. Which looked like it would have been a pretty good quality pickle if I were the kind of person that enjoyed cucumbers soaked in evil. My sandwich was fine. Nothing wrong with it except the crusts of the bread were stale and hard to bite off. All of the components of a good BLT were there (including a good amount of crispy bacon), but somehow altogether the sandwich as a whole was just lacking excitement. On the other hand, at least I had some excellent fries for supplementation.

The thing that really got me, though, was the $3 strawberry lemonade that was so strongly flavored with artificial sugar syrup, that I ended up pouring about 1/3rd of my bottled water into the drink throughout my stay there. Every time I added more it didn't even seem like the overbearing taste was getting any lighter. There were no strawberries either, which is just unacceptable. I left without finishing the entire lemonade, and was quite pissed I spent so much money on it, especially since I had to almost remake the drink myself.

After leaving an appropriate tip, the total spent on my ho-hum lunch was about $12, and I wish I could take it back. I know I could've gone to McDonald's and gotten a cheeseburger combo for like $4 or something, but I wanted to avoid that type of high-fat fast food. Except at least their burgers are tasty (in my opinion). Taking Iggy's out of the equation, I'm getting more and more annoyed that healthier options are always more expensive than those that clog your arteries and offer no nutritional value. It's a trade off between saving money and preserving your body. In the case of today's lunch, I probably didn't so well on health either, with those french fries and bacon. But whatev. Tomorrow is a new day.

And even though my meal today was unimpressive, I'll still probably go back another time. I know that other items on their menu are well done, and their service is good, so I probably just need to learn what their best choices are before I order something boring. For example, the one time I've had dessert at Iggy's I shared the "Homemade Bread Pudding" with one of my besties, and it was delicious. Trial and error is the name of the game I guess, but now I'll be more careful when going to a sit-down restaurant and expecting to get a good meal for a cheap price.

Penny for My Thoughts: Writing Prompts

What is silence to you?


Silence is the absence of the sound.
It is what I value when I'm home alone in a determined mood, on a day off, to study and get some good homework done. I cannot focus with music on, sadly, despite my love for it. I'll sit down at the kitchen table with my mechanical pencil and calculator all ready, notebooks neatly aligned, and I'll just GO. Focus focus focus. No facebook, no TV, no lunchtime. Productivity at its best.


A list of things I'll never do.


This is funny because I'm always making lists of things I WANT to do, and if we're going with crazy and wild experiences here, I can't think of anything that I'll completely rule out before giving it considerable thought. I can't say I won't ever go skydiving or audition to be on the Bachelor or fall in love with someone twice my age. I CAN say that I do not ever want to have a failed marriage - divorce is not an option. I will never get in a physical fight with anyone, mostly because I just couldn't bring myself to inflict pain on anyone else. But see, even then I don't know what the future will hold. If some bizarre situation arose where my family members were being held hostage and tortured and I had the chance to deck the person/persons responsible, I might have to do that. But who knows. 


If I could get anything in the world for my birthday, it would be...


An all-expense paid trip to Disneyland for me and some friends. The Disney theme parks are something I dream about too frequently for a 19 year old young adult. You'd think I'd never been, but we DID go to Disneyworld around the time that I was 12 or 13. Before that it had been a long time, so long that I don't even have correct memories, I would say. They are the foggy memories of the 3 year old version of me, where everything was magical and nothing could ever go wrong. I remembered what I wanted, which is not much. I'd love so much to go back again with my friends who desire that same type of magic that our youths brought us. After all, the older we become the further away from our childhoods we get, and now is the time to seize the opportunities before we stop stop loving what we once did. 


A joke that makes me laugh is...


What do a duck and a wagon have in common? They both have wheels. Except for the duck.


Did you know Helen Keller had a playground in her backyard? Neither did she. (yeah, I'm sick in the head.)


Two peanuts were walking down a dark alley at night. One was assaulted. (a salted! peanut! haha!)


What would you do if you were the President? 


Resign.


What did you do before we had the internet? 


That was so long ago, relative to my lifetime, that
a) I don't really remember, and 
b) It is incomparable to life WITH the internet, because I was at a totally different age group where it didn't matter. 
I believe I got an e-mail address for the first time in 4th grade, and started IM-ing in 6th or 7th. Before the complete social network boom, I occupied myself with dance twice a week, extra dance in my free time, golf when I was little, and sewing lessons when I was even littler. I read a lot in my tween/teen days. During the summer we went to the pool. Yeah ... that's all I can think of.


Think of a time when you've won something. Tell what you won and how you won it.


First instinct was to talk about the sweepstakes I enter online sometimes. A while back I heard about a sweepstakes for Pottery Barn Teen on the internet and I probably spent an hour or two in one day just repeatedly filling out the form to enter over and over again. I ended up winning one of the smaller prizes, a $75 gift card, which I used to buy a nice duffle bag that I still use and lend to my mom sometimes. 


But the point of this question was probably to get at some accomplishment I'm proud of, and I guess the two that come to mind most prominently have to do with dance. When H & I won 1st place for our hip hop duet as juniors in high school, that was a pretty rad time. And later that year when I won first place in the state Drill Down competition for our division, that was pretty rad also. I don't know if I had ever entered a drill down comp. before then. I had always wanted to, but was always scared or didn't want to waste the $2 or whatever. But anyway, just that feeling of knowing you were one of the sharpest and quickest to respond to those tricky commands was something special. I remember practicing at recess and lunch, all the way back in 8th grade at least! It was just fun to do.


And the hip hop duet was cool because we'd never done a duet before, and it was a lot bigger and more meaningful than winning first place on a team dance, because that happened often with our company, and in those cases you were only a small part of the whole. With this dance each of us contributed 50% to the whole (100% effort!), and it was one of my favorite dances to DO. Also the choreography and costumes fit us perfectly, and later when we performed during a pep rally for the school, everybody got to see how cool we really were. 

What would your life be like if you had a pet dinosaur?

Hell yeah! Having a pet dinosaur would rock my world. He'd be my best friend, my mode of transportation, and my bodyguard all at once. I'd ride him to school everyday and then let him roam the mountains and poop wherever he wanted while I was in class. I'd tell him all my deepest secrets and we'd eat snowcones together in the summer time. If I ended up in a dark alley at night and was about to be a salted (hehe), my pet dinosaur (some sort of raptor, for sure) would be right there to kick the trash out of my assailant and make him wish he'd never messed with me. 

Perfection Awaits

Things I've Been Perfecting As of Late

• Banana orange smoothie: Some flawless combination of bananas, oranges, vanilla yogurt, and ice. 

• Financial analysis ratio memorization.
  Current Ratio = Current Assets/Current Liabilities

• Various challenging songs on Band Hero using the drums.
  Eg. Hands Down (Dashboard Confessional)

• Cafe World customer satisfaction - are stable ratings in the future? Almost! 

• Developing a good sleep schedule. Perfection here may actually be unattainable, but I am getting better.

• Envisioning myself in my dream apartment, one that I have actually found. 

• Sweepin' mines  

• Art 1010 weekly assignment procrastination.

• This astonishingly fun game called Engtanglement. 

• Being a lousy friend by taking forever to write and send letters. 

• Dressin' up 80s style! Rocking the side pony, neon bracelets, and chunky square earrings (shown at right). 

By the way, when trying to find an alternate title for this post since I already like the title of the list and I didn't want to use the same word twice, I tried to find a synonym for the first word. Here are the results:

Conclusion: There is no substitute for perfection. 

...

"Nobody ever drowned in sweat."

"Brave hearts do not back down." 

"Never, never, never give up!"   HOO-AH!! 

Quotes by Marine Corp, Sophocles, and Winston Churchill, respectively. 

Music Review: 10 Years

Thanks to my wonderful family members who payed attention to my organized wish list and constant nagging over the holidays, I am now the proud owner of 7 new CD's that came to me as Christmas presents. I've been listening to them a lot, as well as other single songs I've been downloading as usual, and I think I'm finally ready to review one of them!

Feeding the Wolves, 10 Years
Genre: Hard Rock, or Alternative Metal, according to Tuniverse

Oh Lord, I love this CD! 10 Years is a very new band to me. The only music I knew from this band from Tennessee included a single released in 2009 and the single currently being advertised on this album "Shoot It Out", from 2010. I must've had a really intuitive feeling that I would love the rest of it, because usually I listen to more than two songs before buying an album's band. Anywho, I'm glad I put this on my wish list because it's a great one!

It's always hard for me to describe music in words, so I try to look for other bands the music is similar to. It is my personal opinion that they are pretty different from any other band, but at times they have reminded me of: Three Days Grace, Framing Hanley (mostly on the first verse of "The Wicked Ones"), and Panic! at the Disco. Except I think I might like them better than all three of those bands. All of their songs have diverse melodies, upbeat head-banging/foot-tapping rhythms, and choruses that are easy and fun to sing along with once you learn the lyrics. The bridges deserve commendation for not just being slightly varied versions of the already played choruses or verses, like many bands do when trying to hide the fact that they've run out of music-making juice.

Of course I haven't listened to the lyrics much yet because I'm all about the sound, but at least I can say it's definitely not focused on sex and drugs. Actually, I haven't even come across a song that seems to touch on romance or relationships all that much, and that's rare these days, wouldn't you say? Don't quote me on this, but it appears that the songs are mostly the kind that analyze personal performance and inner struggle-type things, like in these lyrics from "Waking Up the Ghost":

     I, I'm waking up the ghost
     Not digging up the memories that were dead to me
     Now, now I'm getting close
     Closer to the enemy that's inside of me

I have an immense attraction to the perky songs like that one that leave my legs bopping up and down uncontrollably (not in a spastic way), but even the ballads on the album can hold their own. "One More Day" and "Don't Fight It" don't have to compete with the energized songs they're surrounded by, because the whole set flows like a well-made album should. Another thing I appreciate is the specific song titles that are easily connected to the songs themselves. When you see the words "Dead in the Water" or "Chasing the Rapture," you can easily recall the sound and lyrics they refer to. I get really annoyed when an album's song titles are all one or two vague words and you have to think harder to remember them. Three Days Grace has this problem, and in general I think their songs are less memorable - or at least the ones that aren't immediate radio hits. There we go! That's why 10 Years is better! As a whole, this album is more memorable. (An epiphany just occurred inside List Girl's head.)

What I don't like about the CD:
- It is not long enough! There are only 10 songs total, adding up to less than 45 minutes.

- The front insert doesn't contain lyrics to any of the songs. It is two pages. Lame.

In conclusion, 10 Years' album Feeding the Wolves is a quality rock/alternative album with pep and variety, but I wish there was more OF it. Here's one of my favorites, for you to taste the awesomeness.