Just spent part of the evening filling the paper work for my mandatory annual physical.

This normally wouldn’t bother me except that I seem to have to do it every year because the company I work for seems to send me to a different clinic every year which means I can’t use the medical history from the year before. I suspect they are either chasing discounted prices or are forgetful.

I suspect the latter because, for three years in a row now, they’ve scheduled health checks for the last few days of the term. It then follows that I point out that I will be missing a number of last classes, depriving my students of vital information about the exams.

This year that was met by  the email equivalent of a huff and sigh and then two weeks of waiting while they found a date. This is an improvement, though, over last year, when they expected my colleague to cover for me in the morning and then expected me to go back to school after having a barium test.

I told them “no way” (full disclosure: the language used was actually, um, more colorful and profane than that) unless someone at the office got a barium test in the morning and then go back to work in the afternoon.

Tomorrow I’m supposed to get a tube down the throat again, but they sent me form about the barium test.

Tomorrow might be kind of interesting.

Lately it has become a tradition on our daughters’ birthdays that we eat steak at a hamburger place that used to be a Red Lobster.

When it was  Red Lobster it became notorious for poor customer service. That included long lines when there wasn’t a large crow inside (partly because they apparently had no plan for bussing tables) and misspelling our oldest’s name (and then not correcting it) when we surprised her with a birthday party there.

Eventually it closed and was replaced by a restaurant called Hamburger Koubou (or Hamburger Workshop). It’s draw is an all you can eat salad bar, that includes bread, various pasta dishes, soft tacos (or spring rolls), curry and desserts. Its specialty is hamburger steak, but we almost always get real steak instead.

We go because around their birthdays our daughters become carnivores and suddenly desire steak. We gladly take them and much too much is eaten. Since today is our youngest’s birthday, we were pleased when she decided to maintain the tradition.

The trouble is, for reasons I don’t fully understand, we get placed in the same booth which is apparently the back up raw meat storage section. The air conditioner blasts one half of the booth directly, but shows a little mercy to the other half. Mind you, this doesn’t bother me, but it annoys the girls and She Who Must Be Obeyed. We could move, but the layout of the air conditioners leaves me with little hope that there’s a warmer section.

Of course, the cold doesn’t stop us from helping ourselves to the all you can eat soft-serve ice cream.