the passionate ailurophile

…the Seashore Trolley Museum, that is.  He’s a member, and the annual meeting is tomorrow.  If the weather turns out to be okay, he’s gonna go.

That place bores me to tears.  Okay, so it’s fun for maybe an hour or two, then it bores me to tears.  But I think I’m still going to go with him.  The place is only a few miles away from Federal Jack’s brewpub in Kennebunkport, and I’m willing to put up with almost ANYTHING if Federal Jack’s is at the other end.

The members of the trolley museum are putting on a spaghetti dinner, but Mike says he doesn’t want to go to that.  That would be the correct answer, if he wants me to come with him to the place.  I still remember the last banquet thingy full of train enthusiasts that we attended, it was something like five years ago, at the Sheraton in South Portland.  What a dump that place was!

A lot of these train people never come out of the basement, or wherever they play with their toy trains, except for a few times a year for these meetings and conventions.  As a result, they have absolutely NO social skills.  There was no assigned seating at this banquet, and this one guy took my seat right out from under me as I was lowering my ass onto it, ignoring that fact that I was trying to sit next to my husband, who was already seated.  The asshole expected me to go and sit with strangers at another table.  Well, I yelled at the whole lot of them, the guy’s friends were all assholes, too.  They finally *let* me sit with Mike, and slunk off to other tables.

Well, I also yelled at them that they could have their stupid seat back, because the food was atrocious.  Yet the other people at the table thought it was actually GOOD, and ate it.  They obviously didn’t get out much, nor did they seem to know how to cook.  If I were married to a guy like that, I could probably make him a cat shit sandwich (we have no shortage of cat shit in this house!), bring it down to the basement where he was busy with his trains, and he’d eat it, and say it was tasty.  I mean, these guys are so damned obsessed with their model trains, they think of little else!

I’m just glad that Mike isn’t like this.  I’d probably have divorced him long ago if he were.  Anyhoo, he promised that we never have to socialize, if you can call it that, with train people ever again.  That means no spaghetti dinner with them.

To be extra sure that there will be no trolley car people spaghetti dinner for us,  we’re having spaghetti for dinner TONIGHT.  I cook the meat sauce in the slow cooker, and it’s really good.  Tonight’s sauce is made up of ground beef and Italian sausage meat that I had left over from a meat loaf recipe I made earlier in the week.  Those family-sized packs of meats are too big for one meat loaf, so I always get another meal or two out of them.

Any spaghetti sauce I can make is probably better than whatever they’ll serve at this dinner.  It’s probably some canned or jarred crap, anyway, and the pasta will either be way undercooked, or way overcooked.  These people probably think that “al dente” is the name of an Italian train line.   And they probably have that dreadful grated cheese that comes in a cardboard can…that stuph has NO flavor.  I buy wedges of Parmesan and grate it up as needed, now that has flavor.

As for the bread:  their spaghetti dinner = horrible store-bought Italian bread that is probably stale and ice cold, and BUTTER to put on it.  Mine = freshly baked pane all’olio, still warm from the oven, with herb-infused olive oil for dipping.

I guarantee that if Mike had even a single thought left of dragging me to that spaghetti dinner, that thought will be blown away when he has MY spaghetti dinner.  And he’ll be more than happy to go to Federal Jack’s, and even buy me that $23 lobster roll, dammit!

Yeah, that’s how much lobster rolls are these days!  When we were at Jack’s last week, they actually put the market prices on the menu, because they are so much higher than usual.  Many people, myself included, will order something with a price of “market” without asking how much…usually, the lobster roll there is about $15.00, give or take a buck or two.  But now, the prices are high enough that they want people to know how much before ordering.

This is due mostly to the weather, and the high cost of fuel.  Fishing and lobster boats run on diesel for the most part, and that’s even more expensive than regular.  And it’s not just this one restaurant…when we were at the Summer Shack on Thursday night, I noticed that the prices for their lobster dishes had risen by about the same amounts, as well.

Jack’s does have a wicked good lobster roll.  Now I really want one!  I figure that if I allow myself to be dragged to the boring trolley museum to keep Mike company, I’ll have EARNED it!

So I need to make sure my iPod is fully charged up, and that I bring plenty of stuph to read, so I can alleviate the boredom while Mike does his thing.   I’m NOT sitting through boring meetings, that’s for sure!