"I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

He comes in and tosses a quarter on my desk. In his mind, I guess we're even. I thank him and add it to the change in my drawer; I bet he asks for it back before noon. He's a skinny seventeen year-old who passes for younger, and he eats his way through his day. Every day he picks up the free breakfasts and lunches, styrofoam trays of pizza and potatoes and a brownie that he always discards. He eats in my room as half of them do, and when he finishes, he asks the same question:

"Ms. P., do you have a dollar?" I ask him if he's still hungry as I fish in my wallet, and every day he says that he is.

Every day he promises, "I bring you money tomorrow," and every day I agree. Now and then, he gives me a handful of coins and bills, the sum either of what he owes or, more likely, he has. As long as he's trying and as long as he's eating, I'm fine with our arrangement. But oh, how I wish he had ever seen Popeye just so he'd get the reference.

San Antonio, revisited

the photographer's flickr

Sea World, perhaps Six Flags, the River Walk, some big swimming pool shaped like Texas: these are the attractions the city of San Antonio keeps trying to sell me during the breaks in the Alamo-not-really-well-technically a Bowl game. They have it all wrong. The cilantro cream enchiladas and the pancakes-- that's what I'm going back for. Maybe the Alamo at 2 a.m., make it a breakfast buffet. Plus a steak and a Shiner in Gruene. Show me where I can actually get a good margarita, and I am so there.

Biggest Loser indeed

Tonight brought the grand finale of the third of my trio of guilty pleasures -- reality TV. First went The Amazing Race, Sunday night Survivor ended, and tonight the Biggest Loser was crowned. I'm pretty pleased with all three outcomes:

--brother-and-sister team Nick and Starr Spangler (she's now dating someone from the show who I hope is surnamed Banner, or that he'll change to it)
--high school physics teacher Bob Crowley became the oldest (and perhaps most genuine) Survivor winner
--and Michelle Aguilar gave Biggest Loser it's biggest misnomer. Michelle is no loser.

Not after patching things up with her mother, who joined her on the show. They hadn't spoken in 5-1/2 years after mom left her daughter and husband for another man, taking Michelle's siblings with her.

Not after nearly leaving the show for the guilt she felt about leaving her dad at home, not to mention many years of pent up guilt and feelings of inadequacy.

Certainly not after sharing the same household as Icky Vicky and Hippo Heba. I know it's a game, but Vicky showed her true colors through her behavior and should have been sent home by Shellay when she had the chance. Heba was her all-too-willing partner in crime.

All's well that ends well though as Michelle won despite not having the highest percentage of weight loss. That distinction falls on Heba, who lost 46.93 percent dropping from 294 pounds to 156 (contestants spend about three months at the ranch for the taped episodes and nearly that long before the live finale).

Michelle "only" lost 45.45 percent, going from 242 to 132. You could always see the beauty in her and her mom, but tonight you could tell they both finally saw it themselves. You have to love a reality show that rewards those that it brings the best out of.

In a perfect twist of the game that restored my faith in the voting public, America got to choose between Heba and her husband Ed to be the third finalist to join Michelle and Vicky. Ed pleaded with viewers to vote for Heba, and both seem to have spent the last three months assuming we'd listen.

Not so fast, my friends. A very pregnant Allison Sweeney revealed that Ed received 84 percent of the vote. Talk about profound rejection!

Heba wound up winning the $100,000 consolation prize, which is probably fair. And Vicky got shut out, finishing third among the finalists. Reality can be harsh.

To his credit, Ed lost 139 pounds (one more than Heba), but started out at 335 (41 pounds higher). Yes, losing weight is easier for men, but in his defense he's a chef. How can you know if it's good if you don't taste it?

Pounds-wise, Phil, who took the most crap from Vicky and Heba -- until he was voted out and they turned their wrath on Shellay -- led with 180 pounds. Can you imagine?

Phil's wife Amy nosed him out for second place in the consolations with 45.85 percent to his 45.62. That couple is nearly half the size it was six months ago!

So close and yet so far

Once upon a time, for a very long time, there was a bean field. And the bean field was good, and more often than not it yielded beans of a soy-type nature, or so I assume. But, being located between a highway and clusters of subdivided houses, the field was as ripe for development as it was for harvest, and thus the farmer cashed in. And therefore over the past year or two, nothing has grown in this former bean field except a strip mall, and another strip mall (still empty), and an Arby's, and a Walgreens (unfinished in May, perhaps now open), and, of course, a Starbucks. In a former bean field, out by the side of a highway.

"Apparently they ran out of places to put them." That's all I could think up, between the bean field Starbucks and the one in the steel mill town down the road, the most un-Starbucks-y place around. But whatever, they're everwhere, doesn't matter much to me, not being a coffee drinker, except upon rare occasions such as three or four o'clock in the morning in the middle of a Relay. But yesterday, a few months belatedly, I discovered that Starbucks is now selling Top Pot doughnuts--a doughnut worth the flight to Seattle, if you ask me. Now, of course, way out here, it wouldn't really be the same, but it might be nearly good enough, and it's loads more convenient--the bean field is at the end of my school year commute. Except now the Starbucks people, once known for their real estate savvy, have realized to their chargrin that they opened stores in steel mill towns and bean fields, and mere months later, are going to close them. Heavy, heavy sigh. They can keep their coffee, but a Top Pot doughnut was nearly motivating me to go to work. Perhaps instead I'll take a trip.

Biggest Loser

For the first time in "Biggest Loser" history, a woman won. I didn't used to pay the show much attention, even when a former Iowa wrestler was a contestant. This year, however, it has been my constant companion as I've waged my own battle of the bulge.

When I next weigh in on Monday, I'll be something more than 35 pounds lighter than I was Jan. 14. That pales in comparison to the totals posted by contestants on the "reality" show, as does my prize, but I take just as much satisfaction in the accomplishment. And I didn't have to make a fool of myself on national TV.

The faculty/staff competition put together by a student fitness organization couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. A slowing metabolism coupled with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the daily caloric intake of a teenager is not a healthy combination. By December, I was sufficiently dissatisfied with my appearance and concerned for my health that I decided to do something about it.

Exactly what wasn't clear until the "New Year, New You" faculty and staff competition was announced. I teamed up with two co-workers and we recruited a volleyball player/athletic trainer to be our coach.

My 30-pound goal became an obsession. It was as if my life depended on it. The day the body fat scale said I was no longer classified as "obese", I knew that it did.

I'm the last one to spew health advice, but there's no magic to weight loss. Burn more calories than you consume and you'll lose weight. Consume more calories than you burn and you'll gain. It's really that simple.

I did learn some things about helping my body work for me -- breakfast, for instance, isn't just a good idea, it's the law -- and I've learned to make smart choices about what I put in my mouth. I've learned I really can fit exercise in to my daily routine.

I'll be proud next week to be crowned "biggest loser" in our little competition, but -- just like the reality show -- the real prize is the ego boost that comes with feeling good and looking good. Even as grilling season nears, I know I didn't go on a diet -- I changed my life.

Picture perfect

A perfect day, I've come to know, starts with a healthy breakfast... so long as one wakes before 11. So, pretty much any weekday.

Perfect days are more infrequent. Take today for instance.

A nine-mile bike ride to the beach, followed by four hours of basking in the glorious sunshine, followed by a nine-mile bike ride home. Somewhere along the way, I snapped a photo I'm pretty fond of. Perhaps you'll like it too.

My 12 DON'Ts of Christmas

Home again after the annual Christmas gift opening marathon with my wife’s family, I feel the need to get some things off my chest. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but it seems to me when you tell people who live an hour away that the party starts at 4 p.m. that it should, in fact, start about then.

Now I realize people have complicated lives and their world doesn’t revolve around mine, but is it really too much to expect people to stick to the plan? And when it’s the same person who keeps everyone else waiting year after year, it gets downright irritating -- at least to an outsider.

Maybe I’m just grumpy after waking – more accurately, being awakened – 11 hours prior to the scheduled festivities. And perhaps I should be more understanding of the sister-in-law whose brood includes three bastard children separated in age by nearly 20 years. After all, each of those children has a father with a family too. Add to the mix the flavor-of-the-year fiancée and I should really lighten up. It’s Christmas after all, and family comes first.

At least it should; and that’s my whole point. My in-laws – her flesh and blood – are the only common denominator in the 20 years I’ve known Deb, yet they’re always all-too willing to accommodate her habitual tardiness as she dashes through the woods for Christmas with Thing I, Thing II and Thing III. When do they get to come first?

But this is just the tip of the iceberg that is my observations of Christmas 2007. I give you my 12 DON’Ts of Christmas:

1—See above.

2—DON’T make early arrivers unload and park down by the football field only to allow the tardy to park in the driveway. It’s just bad form.

3—DON’T invite people into your home in the winter and expect them to take off their shoes. (This doesn’t apply to my in-laws, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.)

4—DON’T insist on a Christmas tree that’s larger than your space can accommodate. The only thing that’s grown more than the guest list at the wife’s family Christmas is the TV. Consequently, the tree was relegated to the entryway, behind the French doors, not even in the same room!

5—Speaking of big screen TVs, for which I have great fondness, I don’t mind if you don’t want it on during gift opening. In fact, if the NBA is all you’ve got to offer, I’d just as soon not watch. But DON’T, please baby Jesus don’t, play one of those Yule log DVDs. It generates neither warmth nor fuzzies.

6—One more about big screen TVs (and another that doesn’t apply to my in-laws), DON’T subject everyone in attendance to a slide show of photos from a wedding half the room recently attended. If you must, at least reorient vertical pictures so they don’t appear horizontally on screen and add some music or something other than an unrehearsed commentary by Mom and Grandma. “She sure seems to be having a good time in the bathroom” is just something you shouldn’t hear at a family Christmas gathering.

7—If someone gets me something that you also got me and you find out about in time to make a change; DON’T expect me to exchange it. That’s on you.

8—If you can’t do better than a gift card, especially to a place I wouldn’t even spend my own money (McDonald’s comes to mind), DON’T bother.

9—DON’T give lottery tickets, ever.

10—DON’T leave goodies within the reach of small children and expect others to monitor their consumption.

11—All son-in-laws, fiancées and boyfriends are not created equal. DON’T treat them that way. Seniority ought to count for something.

12—DON’T fake it. This applies to trees, religion and, most of all, food. For example, don’t ask me to bring a relish tray just so I don’t come empty-handed while you whip up a batch of “homemade” soup from Sam’s Club. I can do better, and so can you.

Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch?

Clearly, the yahoos who want to send the immigrants back just don't have a tamale connection.

Other things that suck (besides the outcome of that game)

So once upon a time Eric Schlosser wrote a book called Fast Food Nation, and I stopped eating hamburger at McDonald's. This was no hardship, because, yuck, and I don't take a hardline stance as I do against the Wal-Mart. Once in a while I'll drive thru the arches; I just don't eat the McCows. Some time here lately I noticed I'd stopped eating at Burger King, too, but that was purely a matter of taste: the proportion of filler to beef in their burgers seem to have tilted entirely to soybeans. I suppose I'm a supporter of Illinois and its crops, but when it comes to hamburger, I want them to be meat, and now we have a Culver's! And now, thanks to Mr. Schlosser, I can again cloak my fast food selectivity in righteous indignation. Turns out the Burger King honchos not only have creepy taste in ads but are also greedy bastards. Shocking, I know.

Penny Foolish
By Eric Schlosser

From NYTimes.com

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida’s tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state’s growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America’s most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate “federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering.” It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. “Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit,” a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times.

Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.

Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King’s stock. Last year, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, earned the largest annual bonus in Wall Street history, and this year he stands to receive an even larger one. Goldman Sachs has served its investors well lately, avoiding the subprime mortgage meltdown and, according to Business Week, doubling the value of its Burger King investment within three years.

Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and “Reefer Madness.”

What gives?

It's all over but the clearing-out of the parking lot, and yes, it's getting a little random-- even more so than usual. Forgive me. I'm a little five-day-weekend antsy. But, before I hit the road, I've just gotta know, given the hits from North Carolina and Texas, both seeking our most popular Open Thread commodity within moments of each other: hermaphrodite deer. Is this some new Thanksgiving delicacy of which I'm not aware?

Field Trip

2007 has become the year of the road trip, though I hesitate to say that even in this semi-public. Given that QuikTrip has gas at $2.98 per unleaded gallon, I'm afraid if I publicize this new hit-the-highway habit I might have to give up any claim I have left to smarts.

Like I care.

The going is worth it. Today the mr. is in Nashville to watch a hockey team who plays their home games twenty minutes from our house. Even since September we've done a thousand miles for football, and I've ridden hours upon hours to have someone read from a book and sign it. Can you say anywhere but here? That is a chunk of the appeal. To go be where even the laundry is someone else's problem? Take. me. there, I think. So I use my grown-up powers and do. Or did, you know, that one time. Maybe two. So far.

Today's excursion is far more modest, doesn't require a bag to be packed-- though I should probably check the gas gauge: we'll be driving about an hour. It's Saturday, and I've spent all week in the car, but some things are worth the trip, and sometimes you've just gotta go. The girl is coming with me, and we're both bringing a friend (the company's the best part of a road trip). We're all hyped up even before the fat and sugar, and I expect an excellent introductory-road-trip-for-ten-year-olds time. What's at the other end of the highway? Pancakes! And then a stop at Trader Joe's (got that, Miriam?) where we can buy snacks for the next leg of the journey, 'cause you should always be prepared to just go.

Addendum:

While Trader Joe's was there, of course, and ready to take my money (and clean up the bottles of beer that exploded all over--not my fault, though I was trying to buy them), turns out the pancakes weren't. My source was oh, so sadly mistaken, and our spirits plunged right with our blood sugar.

"We're in training 'til Tuesday," said the no-customer-service manager. "Friends and family only." Given how far we came to get there, you'd think we'd have qualified as friends, but Mr. Pancakes didn't see it that way.

"See you soon!" Um, seems doubtful. We didn't come from across the street.

"Would you like a menu?" To not order from? Time to go now! We. have. got. to. eat! And we did, at some place we'd never been to, that was good if just another chain. And bonus and thank baby Jesus, we made it before noon, before the breakfast menus were put away. So those who wanted breakfast got breakfast. And pancakes! And the rants were pocketed, put away. Good Saturday, good little road trip. And I've got a kitchen full of Trader Joe's still to eat.

out for breakfast

When the after school planets and schedules align just so, I end up waiting for a bus from the primary school to discharge a dozen or so little bitty kids to parents who seem to carpool down to the main road from the far cul de sacs of their subdivision. As one who parents only a ten year old who looks twelve, those children seem impossibly small to me, though I realize they're quite capable of big and even conniving thoughts. Like, "How do I make sure to get that blue button--the winning one--and not the white, and not let a tiny detail like the fact that I don't like to eat breakfast stand in the way?" At least that's what my first grade mind was thinking, once upon a time.

I do not remember how the Astronaut Game was played, only that eating what seemed like vast quantities of breakfast foods (and I'm guessing Kellogg's) was essential for success. I do remember scoffing at my friend Lisa, who dutifully reported the brownie that she ate before school while the Zinger that I had after picking at my more nutritious, reportable breakfast was consumed, shall we say, under the table. Given that I was seven, my mother must have played a role in that week-long subterfuge, and while I'm not proud of my first attempt at gamesmanship, I do still have that pin.

Breakfast and I maintained our adversarial relationship for years; maybe I was just working off the guilt. At some point I got over it, though, and now I love to go out for breakfast or cook it here or a late, lazy Saturday, though I do, now and forever, draw the line at ever even sampling one of my mother-in-law's sausage balls. I mean, really. Even if she could cook or if I liked sausage, that just sounds wrong. It was even breakfast that was the one bright spot during our year in "hell or Indianpolis," as we discovered The Original Pancake House there. And now, praise baby Jesus, they're opening one here. Or, given urban sprawl, within 45 minutes of so of my front door, maybe an hour. A miniature road trip. But given that we've timed our drives through Minneapolis and Birmingham just to make sure we got some, and tried to track one down in San Diego, that's nothing, or at least not too much, at least once in a very great while. Given all the time I spend in the car, it does seem kind of silly. I mean, I'm sure I make banana pancakes that are as good or nearly, but breakfast competition? Perhaps I shouldn't go there. Then again, is there a prize?

They did what to that pickle?

Unless you're going to be perverse and offer me something from a menu of offal, I'd like to think that I'm not too difficult to satisfy. I was, years and years ago, only a partially successful anorexic because I actually like to eat. I don't like sauerkraut, though. Or maple syrup (give me bananas and powdered sugar on my pancakes. Or Courtesy Diner crackbutter*). I don't like rhubarb, either, though I tended my own patch for five years because my aunt either lacked the sentimentality or the sense to keep the very plants that my dearly departed grandpa planted in 1978 alive herself and somebody, to my way of thinking, had to do it. I even tried to transplant the the hardiest of those nasty red stalks when we moved, though my new yard lacked any suitable space, but mostly failed. I honor the vegetative determination of 25 year old perennials, but I'm still not going to eat them.

I eat dill pickles, though. But I hereby guarantee that I will never eat one marinated in Kool-Aid.


*Get your mind out of the gutter, go to the Courtesy Diner, order and eat some pancakes, straight, with no syrup or jelly or what have you, try to stop eating said pancakes, no matter how full you are, and tell me there's no crack in that butter. Go ahead, try.