A dirty restaurant, cheap but good food and free entertainment?

For those that personally know the Blueshelled family, most are aware that the last 4 months have been months of great change in our familial health. All three of us have taken an active role in watching what we eat and attempting to be more active. For me, unfortunately, a bum back, then a bum knee, now surgery preventing therapy for the knee, has made the activity part difficult. However, among the three of us, we've been doing quite well for ourselves on the sticking with it.

One of the ways we accomplish this is by having one day a week that we can eat whatever we want and as much as we want. Generally, what we've found is that we only go about 500 calories over our restricted daily caloric intake and we more than make up for that throughout the week.

With all of that explained and out of the way, Saturday has been our beloved free day. Free day is what gets us through the rough days where we want to eat everything under the sun, but don't. Free day is coming and we can eat all those bad for you things then. The knowledge of it is soothing. What's funny is that, come free day, we still don't know what we want to eat. It shows how food has taken a back seat in our lives.

Tonight was no exception. Dinner time came and we drove around the area looking for inspiration. At long last, we settled upon the Waffle House. If you have never been to the Waffle House, you have never set foot in the South. They used to be dirty, filthy pits of cigarette smoke where you could get greasy food at cheap prices in a reasonable amount of time. Now they are dirty, filthy pits minus the cigarette smoke (thank you smoke free Tennessee!) where you can get greasy, TASTY food at cheap prices in a reasonable amount of time.

As we walked in, all the tables were dirty and we sat down at one and had to ask someone to clean it for us. Husband ordered what he calls "Satan" hash browns. I can't tell you what all is involved in this meal other than it smells pretty bad and is 100% guaranteed to give you heartburn from looking at it. The verdict from Husband is "Delicious!" AJ and I ordered our regular variety of foods and we sat quietly talking while waiting for our food.

In the middle of what seemed a fairly standard meal, the Waffle House staff erupted in drama. 2 new people showed up and immediately started telling the others they were now required to stay overnight (this was around 9pm), as 3 people had called in sick. This turned into 30 minutes of all of the staff there complaining about how people only call out on a Saturday if they are lying and how, since the 3 of them are friends, it must be A PARTY!

Of course, this turned into one using his defense mechanisms to justify his staying as to how he needed the money and would get overtime. This was until the manager burst his bubble to tell him how they would just switch his shifts later in the week and "make" those that called out tonight cover the shifts, thus demoralizing the poor guy even more with the knowledge that he was going to not only have to stay up all night to cover someone's shift, but also was not going to get anything extra for his trouble.

Husband, AJ and I didn't even pretend to not listen. This was fascinating stuff. As we packed up to leave, the manager called another staff member back and we heard him say, "You have to stay tonight, too. We just got another phone call."

This is a good incentive to get a college degree, I think, to those that don't have one. But thank you for making my meal interesting.