life in a word – Page 4 – Life In A Word

What’s ‘appening with Dining Out?

After moving our daughter into her college apartment last Saturday, we offered to take a group of her friends out to a local restaurant to celebrate the beginning of the school year. The place we chose did not allow for table reservations but did offer call-ahead seating. Thus did our party of ten arrive during the busy dinner hour and was seated less than ten minutes later. It’s fair to say this call-ahead experience was entirely pleasing to the palate.

Call-ahead seating is an interesting concept to me. It’s somewhere between a full-on reservation and simply showing up for dinner. The restaurant puts you on a list when you call ahead, and then you’re given the next available table after you arrive. In essence, call-ahead mitigates the restaurant’s risk of the no-show reservation.

Call-ahead feels entirely dated if you use OpenTable, of course With OT you’re limited to the restaurants supported by the app, but you’re also given the convenience of choosing cuisine, location, menu, and time; right up to the moment you walk through the door. OT’s website boasts “seating more than 20 million diners per month… across more than 38,000 restaurants”. Clearly the new-age approach to restaurant reservations has arrived.

But is OpenTable also dated? With a little research I was amazed to discover several other companies changing our approach to dining out. Consider the following:

NoWait allows you to add yourself to the wait list of a restaurant that doesn’t take reservations. NoWait is like having someone stand in line for you, with the convenience of knowing when that person gets to the front of the line. Hence you can shop or have a drink nearby instead enduring the crowding and impatience of the restaurant’s waiting area.

Rezhound and TableSweep are boosters for OpenTable. They scan OT for newly-released (cancelled) reservations, then notify you by text or email with what they find. You have to jump over to OT to actually book the reservation (be quick!), but it’s a great concept if you’re in the habit of waiting for last-minute seats at popular restaurants.

Table8 is designed for the more upscale dining experience. Table8’s restaurants set aside a fixed number of peak-time tables every night. You can reserve any available table at a Table8’s restaurant for free, or reserve one of the “set-aside” tables for a fee if there are no other tables. Again, last-minute seats at popular restaurants, as long as you’re willing to pay a little extra.

Settle allows you to book a table, pre-order your food, and pay for your meal on your phone. I’m not a fan of Settle’s time-saving tactics. I think the moments perusing and discussing the menu is part of the fun of dining out, not to mention the brief relationship with your waiter. If saving time is your objective, just get your food to-go.

Shout borders on the absurd. Shout is the ticket-scalper’s approach to restaurant reservations. For a fee negotiated with the “seller”, you the “buyer” can purchase a hard-to-get restaurant reservation, or pay the seller to wait at a given restaurant until your name is called. Really? Is the restaurant that good and your time that important?

To end on a humorous or horrifying note (take your pick), Happy is marketed as the do-it-yourself happy-hour app. Walk into a bar, cue the Happy app, and a timer starts a 60-minute countdown: to enjoy whatever 2-for-1’s or other specials the bar has to offer. So now you can get extra drinks any time of day. Just remember, you only have an hour. On your marks… get set… DRINK!

Beckons the Printed Word

I have a reading problem. Perhaps you can help me with it. I blame my mother of course. She was a voracious reader (feasting on those 700+ page romance novels) and raised my brothers and I to be readers too. Thus newspapers and magazines; hard-covered tomes and soft-covered easy reads; coffee-table books and cookbooks; news feeds, emails, texts; my ever-present Kindle e-reader; even instruction manuals for God’s sake – vie for my reading time and attention. Books reach out to me with invisible hands, fluttering their crisp pages and silently screaming “READ ME!!!”.

Once upon a time I had this under control. You see, in those first childhood visits to the school library you could only check out one book at a time. Read and return. Read and return. Eventually you earned the right to check out several at once. Small piles of books began to accompany me home.

Newspapers already lived in my house. My dad read the newspaper and nothing else, but in his day you had the morning paper and the evening paper. Then one day I noticed Time and Sports Illustrated arrived every week in our mailbox. More reading. And the ever-present World Book Encyclopedia (WBE) flew off the shelf for the many school assignments that demanded it. Here’s an early warning sign: sometimes I found myself leafing through the WBE for no reason at all.

Those innocent resources of yesteryear cemented the multi-tentacled reading monster that dwells in my house today. Our family room is loaded with coffee table books and the complete works of Dickens (which I really need to finish someday). Our kitchen cabinets are weighted down with ten cookbooks for every one that we actually use. Our bedroom has a wall full of books we simply can’t bear to part with – kind of like the clothes you swear will come back into fashion someday. Our nightstands have several put-you-to-sleep choices in their top drawers. And our home office is so loaded I’ve resorted to “stack” instead of “display”.

It’s a delicate balance, this fanaticism for reading. You have to limit your resources and then limit the time you give them. Thus do I only subscribe to one magazine and one newspaper. I follow 10-12 blogs and only those that publish weekly or less. At any given time I’m only reading one book of fiction and another of non-fiction. But beware that book of fiction. If it’s really good, all other reading is kept at bay until I’ve consumed the very last page. And then I have to scramble to catch up.

Amazon has created the ultimate temptation. Not only can you purchase unlimited free “sample reads”, but you can subscribe to a dozen newsletters advertising new authors or popular reads or “we think you might like this” options. It can turn into a feeding frenzy.

If there’s a rehab program to harness too much reading, I suggest the following as the first step. Stay out of bookstores. Keep battling the monster that has taken over your house instead.

Some Kind of Wonderful

I was skimming the headlines yesterday when I noticed Anne Hathaway paying tribute to director Garry Marshall for her acting breakthrough in The Princess Diaries movies. Then I realized the tribute was because Marshall had died recently, at 81 from pneumonia. Something about Marshall resonated with me but I couldn’t put my finger on it (okay, I may have watched the Diary movies with my daughter). When I checked his credits it made more sense. I’ve been drawn to Marshall’s work longer than I ever realized. This guy was prolific.

In the 1980’s, a burst of coming-of-age films hit the big screen. Today they’d still be considered cult-classics. I was particularly drawn to Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty In Pink (1986), and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The characters were about my age and dealing with the kind of teenage angst I could really relate to. As it turns out, John Hughes wrote every single one of these movies. He also wrote one of my all-time favorites (still to this day): Some Kind of Wonderful (1987). If you’re a guy and you’ve seen the movie perhaps you made the same connection. Like Eric Stoltz’s character I was madly in love with Lea Thompson, until I realized I was really in love with Mary Stuart Masterson.

In my obsession with John Hughes (and director Howard Deutch), apparently I overlooked Garry Marshall. Marshall entered my life early with The Lucy Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Odd Couple in the mid-’70’s. My brothers and I watched what my dad wanted to watch in those days, so Marshall gets the credit for some fond father-son memories side-by-side on the family room couch.

By the early ’80’s Marshall had moved on to Mork & Mindy, Laverne & Shirley, and Happy Days. I’m sure I didn’t miss many episodes (and I can still hum the theme songs). Along with The Brady Bunch those were my go-to shows. Bit of trivia: Garry Marshall directed his sister Penny Marshall to fame in Laverne & Shirley.

Marshall solidified his influence on my life when he directed Pretty Woman in 1990. I was so taken by the movie in fact, that I mimicked a few scenes for my wife’s birthday a few years later. I woke her up with a handful of hundred-dollar bills, told her to go out and buy a nice dress for dinner; then showed up later in a limousine, standing through the sunroof in a tux with a bouquet of flowers. It was fun to play the part, but alas I am no Richard Gere.

Trivia again: Garry Marshall played a small role as a tour guide in Pretty Woman.

My wife and I took a chance on the movie Mother’s Day this past May – a light comedy with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Sudeikis (and Pretty Woman star Julia Roberts). Was it a great movie? No. But as it turns out it was the last film directed by Garry Marshall. That little fact gave the movie more substance. With Mother’s Day, Marshall managed to give me more than fifty years of television and movie memories.

Rest in peace Garry. Thanks for so many kinds of wonderful.

Dear Little John

Sports Illustrated occasionally puts out an issue titled “Where Are They Now?”, profiling the next chapters of athletes who were once prominent in their given sport. The latest edition – just this week – fittingly covers the gold-medal winning women’s gymnastics team from the 1996 Atlanta games. I can still picture Kerri Strug landing that perfect vault on a broken ankle; the clinching performance for USA team gold.

If my own friends from twenty years ago wondered “where is Dave now?”, they might stare in disbelief as I navigate my John Deere tractor across acres of ranch property here in Colorado. I like to think of my 42-in. 20HP v-twin hydrostatic front-engine ride as a mean, green, mowing machine. My model D125 chews up the fast-growing grass like a teenager in front of pizza. She’s a veritable beast on wheels.

My wife also has a tractor – a Kubota L4330 “Compact Utility”. Here’s a picture of our babies side-by-side:

Stop laughing now, and step aside with me for some color fun. If you see a yellow tractor it’s probably manufactured by Caterpillar. If it’s blue it’s probably a New Holland. Red equals International Harvester, (though IH stop making theirs in the mid-1980’s). Then you have Kubota in the bright orange and John Deere in a pleasing shade of green. As Skittles would say, Taste the Rainbow!

Okay, back to the photo. I confess my little green kitten is dwarfed by my wife’s Transformer mega-monster. And the stats don’t lie: her Kubota is twice the length and twice the horsepower, and outweighs my Deere by over a ton. She has a roll bar, which suggests she can go four-wheeling in the fields, or even cartwheel her tractor down sand dunes without the slightest of injuries. Me? I pretty much limit my adventure to little circuits around the back lawn.

While I’m at it, I’ll go to full-on confession mode and say my wife is the real tractor pro; not me. She and her Kubota keep the blizzard snow at bay in winter and the pasture grass at a respectable height in summer. My own occasional efforts with the Kubota are far more amateur, but I often make impressive gouges in our dirt driveway.

Last spring my wife rewarded herself with that cab enclosure you see in the photo, complete with side doors and heat. Maybe I’ll get her a stereo for Christmas. Maybe I’ll get my John Deere a seat cover.

Country music singer Jason Aldean had a nice hit with “Big Green Tractor”, but I wouldn’t be able to duet with Jason without thinking “Little”. Craig Morgan also had a hit with “International Harvester”, but I just can’t relate to the lyric “tip your hat to the man UP on the tractor”. Finally, Kenny Chesney made it big with “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”. Okay, now we’re talking (er, singing). Let’s assume my wife feels that way about my Deere, shall we? I’ll keep wearing the JD colors to show my pride.

Even if it’s just a “little” pride.

Four in the Forest

Three years ago this month, our community suffered a devastating wildfire the likes of which had never been seen in Colorado history. Inside of a week, the Black Forest Fire consumed almost 15,000 acres and displaced 38.000 residents. When the fire was finally contained over 500 homes had been destroyed. It was an almost unimaginable force of nature, and a miracle that only two residents lost their lives.

My family and I – and the several horses on our property – were forced to evacuate thirty miles to the north, waiting almost a week to learn the fate of our home. We couldn’t check our phones for real-time updates. Instead, we were at the mercy of twice-daily television reports. We were glued to the screen as the spokesperson would list impacted streets and addresses. By the grace of God our house was spared, even though the fire came within a mile of our property. But the beautiful Black Forest now bears a miles-long scar that will be evident for decades, if not hundreds of years.

The fire was a testament to a higher power, but also to the efforts of the “first-responders”. Almost 500 firefighters battled the blaze; probably ten times the number manning our local stations. I am in awe of these professionals, working tirelessly as well as putting their lives on the line for people like myself whom they will never meet. They are the epitome of heroism.

A year after the fire our community established “4 Miles in the Forest”, an annual fun run to benefit the Black Forest Fire/Rescue department. “4 Miles…” attracts several hundred participants, including the firefighters themselves. It is conducted at Section 16, a square mile of the forest with a trail around the perimeter for walking, running, biking, and horseback riding. Thanks to an elementary school within the Section the firefighters held the line and saved the entire property.

When I ran the inaugural “4 miles…”, I was delighted to find I was pacing one of the firefighters most of the way. He must have been carrying 50 pounds of gear as he ran. He was being coached by one of his superiors – as if in boot camp. My own effort was buoyed by the thought that I was accompanied by this truly selfless individual.

This year’s run was different. I found myself alone most of the way, well-spaced between the leaders and the walkers. The solitude gave me time to dwell on the significance of the race: a memorial to a tragic event as well as a testament to those who brought the fire to an end. As I completed the run, I realized my participation had nothing to do with winning the race or where I placed or how fast I had run. In fact it had nothing to do with me at all. Instead my running was a tribute to the selflessness of others; their willingness to fight and protect without reward or recognition. I know they would come to my rescue again without question. They are heroes in every sense of the word.

Office Space Capsule

Yesterday I was thinking about my dorm-room desk from the mid-eighties. On it sat the following essentials: a typewriter, a desk lamp, a month-to-month calendar, a clock-radio, a family photo or two, a few pieces of mail, and the latest edition of the campus newspaper. In the desk drawers I could find a small selection of pens, pencils and highlighters, a stack of spiral-bound notebooks, some textbooks, a calculator, stationery (including envelopes and stamps), a copy of the “Yellow Pages”, my camera, my checkbook, and a few menus from nearby restaurants. Dorm-room desks were solid, but my “office supplies” probably doubled the weight. They were my band of brothers, helping wage battle on that ever-elusive college degree.

If I recreate that same desk setup today, I would lug a huge box into my home office (bend the knees so you don’t hurt your back), drop slowly into my chair, reach into the box, and first pull out… a smartphone. I’d set it in the middle of the vast empty space of my desktop, reach into the box again, and pull out… nothing else. Whoa. My entire college setup has been condensed into the confines of a shiny 2″ x 5″ silicon wafer.

I forgot to mention the “telephone”. My college provided a wired phone with the room – (one of those fancy new touch-tone models – ha). Since my roommate and I positioned our desks to face each other, the phone straddled both desks. That way either one of us could reach the corded handset when all those girls would call (okay, I think that was a fictional memory boost).

Sadly, only a few of my college-era office supplies have survived the advent of technology. I have family photos on my desk, but they’re in the form of a digital frame, scrolling every several seconds. I have pens and pencils in the top drawer, but I only seem to need them for my signature. Finally, I have a wall calendar, but I really only glance at the monthly photos (of my college campus, ironically). Heck, I don’t even need my desk. I can just sit back in my chair with my smartphone and choose any item or activity I was geared for in college.

The convenience of having a desk’s worth of productivity inside a smartphone comes with a drawback. It is the convenience itself. When I woke up in the morning in college, my first thought was breakfast; not sitting down to the various tasks at my desk. In today’s world, we wake up to the instant access and undeniable craving for Facebook and text and email. The capsule may be slightly larger than those in the pill bottle, but the addiction to the contents can be just as powerful.

Here is my nugget of advice. Take a lesson from my college days and choose breakfast first. Avoid the temptation of the smartphone when you first wake up (and the premature stimulation to blood flow – see this Finnish study). For me, it means simply charging my smartphone within the confines of my home office. This forces the inconvenience of opening the door and considering the several other temptations and distractions of my work. Those can wait – bacon and eggs not so much.

Court of Many Colors

If there’s a high season for jury duty, perhaps it begins in June. My sister-in-law was summoned to serve last week, as was one of my good friends this week. Like voting, jury duty is that sometimes humdrum responsibility that comes with citizenship in the U.S. But our government should spend a few pennies to make the summons itself more exciting. Instead of reading, “You are hearby summoned…”, how about, “Congratulations! You’ve just won a day in court!”.

I was summoned myself several years ago. I think everyone should experience jury duty at least once in a lifetime. My county’s process may be different than yours. After the summons, you call the courthouse and punch in your juror number. If you “win”, you get to report to the courthouse on the designated date. You join a couple hundred of your county-mates in a holding room, where you wait several hours to be called to the individual courtrooms, where you may or may not join eleven of your neighbors in the jury box. The whole filtering process takes about a half a day, and 80% of those who made it to the holding room in the first place are dismissed. No matter where you end up, you won’t receive another summons for at least a year.

During my summons I did make it to the courthouse, but I never made it out of the holding room. The only drama for me was wondering if my parking ticket would be validated. But I did depart with an interesting observation. Surrounded by hundreds of others from my county, I realized I was looking at the purest slice of my neighbors that any circumstance can create.

Think about that. Within your county (or just your immediate neighborhood), there are dozens of places where people gather, and countless reasons more for doing so. Schools. Sporting events. Places of worship. Office buildings. Parks. Supermarkets. Restaurants. The list goes on. But which can you point to and say “now these are the people that live in my neighborhood.”

Jury duty draws everyone; the business executive and the ditch digger; the homemaker and the traveling salesman; the parent and the (over-eighteen) child; the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor; the overworked and the underemployed; and every other walk of life regardless of political, religious, sexual, or ethnic affiliation. I can even include our county’s youngest residents because our courthouse offers child care! In fact, the only neighbors you won’t see at jury duty are those with a doctor’s note or those who aren’t U.S. citizens. Everyone else gets to play.

Jury duty is not sexy. It is typically an inconvenience. Even if you serve, your case is not likely to make headlines. But if you do make it to the courthouse, look around and take a measure of those sitting around you. It’s your county – in a nutshell of the purest kind!

Friends in Pro Places

A few weeks ago I went to the dentist. While he put in a new crown we went through a few family updates. Off the top of his head he mentioned something specific about each of my kids, which made me realize just how well he knows me. Then again, he should. I’ve been showing up at his door every six months for the past twenty years.

Each of us has a different definition of “friend”. People enter/exit our lives or they stay for the long haul, but at some point they enter a more intimate circle defined as friendship. Friendship circles are tight or loose, filled or sparse, alike or diverse, but no matter which they contain individuals we hold with our unique sense of esteem. We revere these people.

One friendship circle less obvious than others is the professionals we choose. For instance, I have an appointment today with my hair stylist. I will get in my car, drive forty minutes to his salon, and spend another forty minutes in his company. My stylist is about my age and South Korean. He’s been cutting my hair for over twenty years. In that time he’s worked at a mall-based salon, switched to a local one, and then two years ago he started his own salon with his sister. He knows how to cut hair so I follow him wherever he goes.

Here’s the point. Early on in our relationship I merely trusted my stylist with the cutting of my hair. He quickly figured me out (the male straight-hair cut is no rocket science). Our conversations matured from sports and headlines to the raising of our children and being fathers. Suddenly I was seeking his input on life as we moved from our thirties to our forties to our fifties.

Today I can (and do) talk to my stylist about anything and everything. There’s not much I wouldn’t share with him. He is similarly comfortable with me. One day while driving I absentmindedly did the math. Once-a-month visits. Forty minutes per visit. Twenty years. Astonishingly I realized I’ve visited his salon almost 250 times! We’ve spent almost 160 hours together. That’s a lot of time chatting with one person. That’s enough to give him a page in my book of friends.

Not every professional creates the template for friendship, but there are plenty of good examples. My eye doctor (again, twenty years) gets an annual update on my family, as I do on his. My chiropractor and I have a ten-minute conversation every eight weeks while he makes my back sing. Even my banker, who spends a couple of hours with my wife and I every six months, begins his meetings on a personal note.

The next time you’re in the presence of one of your “regulars”, take a moment to do the math. You may discover you’ve confided in this person more than you realize. Instead of opening the door to your friendship circle and letting them in, you may notice they’re already there.

Space Invader

Last week my family and I were on the road, heading west to Los Angeles. One morning we stopped for breakfast just short of the California state line. As I was paying and the cashier handed back my receipt, I asked her, “so… how’s your day going today?” She gave me a wary smile and replied “f-i-n-e…”. Then she looked at me a little more carefully and asked back (with no small amount of curiosity), “where you from, anyway?” And that’s when it hit me – I had invaded her personal space. At least, the big-city version of personal space.

Take a step back and assess the town you live in. You’ll quickly decide whether you live in the “small” or the “big” variety. I’m not talking about physical size (though size does matter – ha). No, I’m talking about the chemistry of the place, and how you interact with the people around you.

I live in a rural area, and the surrounding towns are not much bigger than “one-street”. And here’s what I observe. People wave to each other from their cars or when walking on the road. People take face-to-face moments – however small – to have conversation. People gather at the local establishments to catch up with each other. The “hometown” parades and festivals and meals still draw decent crowds.

The big city – for all its energy and activities and diversity – is much more insular at the individual level. Its residents seek the comfort of their personal space, whether that is defined as neighborhood or house or even electronic device (personal space guaranteed by headphones and music). Indeed, retreat to personal space in the big city is a survival tactic – a stab at decompression and calm after the hectic hours on the sidewalk or in the car or office.

Be careful if you assume I favor small-town over big-city – far from it. I simply observe the outward differences as well as the inward coping mechanisms. In small towns we tend to have only one of everything (i.e. Mexican restaurant, Starbucks, dry cleaner). In big cities the choices are so vast that choosing Chipotle over the several local options feels like selling yourself short. As my big-city brother so succinctly puts it: small-town means opening the newspaper to see what there is to do, while big-city means deciding what you want to do; then opening the newspaper to see where it’s happening.

Small-town interactions fill the void of perhaps too much time in isolation. Big-city personal spaces ease the stress of perhaps too much time in the crowds. Hence it’s interesting to flip the dynamic every now and then, as I did with my breakfast cashier. She was comfortable in her personal space until I invaded with my casual question. And maybe just for a moment, she let down her distrust guard and realized I was simply interested in how her day was going.

Steal a Card, Any Card

Imagine a carefree Saturday at the mall. You’re shopping with friends for something you really need, or maybe it’s just a little retail therapy. Whatever the reason, the shopping and the purchases make for an enjoyable afternoon. In fact, you’re so satisfied you decide to add on dinner afterwards at a nearby restaurant. All in all a great day, until you wake up the next morning and discover a fraudulent purchase on your credit card. Even more disturbing, you realize the waiter at the restaurant was the odds-on criminal.

My mall story is not hypothetical but actual. My family and I went shopping last weekend, and within twenty-four hours of our purchases we were victims of credit card fraud. What is most aggravating to me is the basic chain of events that points to the nefarious waiter at the restaurant where we dined. Why him? Out of a dozen purchases that day, the restaurant was the only location where the credit card transaction took place out of my sight. Instead of the several point-of-sale mall transactions, the restaurant – as is typical – carried my card away alongside the bill, to be processed somewhere out of sight. Also, the fraudulent purchase the following day was made at the department store adjacent to the restaurant. It’s an easy-as-pie theory on what went down.

My experience begs the question: why do credit card companies include all of the critical information right on the card? Write down (or phone-photo) the name of the cardholder, the sixteen-digit card number, the expiration date of the card, and the three-digit “Card Verification Value” (CVV), and you’re all set to assume the purchasing identity of someone else.

Google Authenticator, which sends a verification code to your phone that is required for login to certain apps, creates a secondary level of security that would significantly decrease credit card fraud. At the least, cardholders should be given a piece of data separate from what is printed on the card, so only they have every last piece of the purchasing puzzle.

Fortunately, credit card fraud is an inconvenience instead of an unexpected financial setback. My bank simply reimburses the amount in dispute, cancels the card, and issues me a new one. I can live with that (unless I owned the credit card company). What I can’t live with is the thieves who work the system. Thus did I send a note to the restaurant manager. I did not directly accuse the waiter as I really have no proof. But I did provide enough detail that perhaps the manager will track the activities of his employees a little closer. My hope is that he discovers the criminal among his otherwise trustworthy staff.