February Photos, Wrapping it Up

I got all the photos on time, I just got distracted by other things (Bobbie is ten now!) and so haven't thrown them up here yet.  Important stuff tomorrow--well, later on Saturday.  Pictures now.

Day 27: Something You Ate
Isn't this a strange thing?  Very close to dinner.  I strongly suspect the fellow who came up with this photo challenge was rather drunk.  Anyhow:

Yeah, we're high class like that.  That day was chilly and rainy; I bought the girls an after school snack at McD's & let them have the run of the PlayPlace for about half an hour.  Cheap fun.

Day 28--Money
Oh, do I find this vapid.  I don't put a lot of worth in money.  Nonetheless, I was a good girl & took a picture of some money:

I am sure I missed the boat on the possibility for deeper meaning here by taking a photograph of the tip I left for the waitress at Golden Corral.  The only thing interesting about this--other than this being the first time the service has been good enough to merit a non-buffet-size tip--is that Linda picked this money up out of the floor in my room.  I gave her a dollar.  She's avaricious.  I think it will benefit her in her life.  My lack of interest in money hasn't exactly led to what most would consider success.  (As I've said, though, I am what I wanted to be when I grew up, and not a whole lot of people can say that.)

Day 29--What I'm Listening To
Well, this isn't a photograph per se.  It's a screen cap.  But it's what I'm listening to more often than not, so it's what you get:

The odd thing about this is, that's not actually the song that was playing when I took the screen cap.  I'm not sure what was, actually.  The "now playing" section of this little pop up (and their website) is wrong more often than not.  I was really hoping that the site's redesign would address this issue, but it does not seem to have occurred to them.  I've actually seen a few website redesigns lately which left huge issues completely unaddressed.  I really don't understand the point in putting money into something of the sort unless it really improves things.  Looks are important, yes, but functionality should be paramount.  Isn't that one of those things I shouldn't have to emphasize, because it should be very basic and understood by anybody who can reach the internet?

Catching up: February Photos Days 24, 25, 26

I am slacking on this so much, I know.  You'd think a picture a day--easy, right.  Guaranteed post.  Or, I thought that.  And I have actually taken a picture every single day.  Just haven't posted them daily.  Which is probably for the best, because this way they won't clog everything up.

Day 24: Inside Your Bathroom Cabinet

Y'know, the strangest things give indication of socioeconomic class.  Apparently, the presence or lack of a bathroom cabinet is one of them.  I have no bathroom cabinet--no medicine cabinet.  Instead, there is a shelf between the toilet & the tub.  This is the top shelf, where I keep most of my stuff (the middle shelf is the one with the reading material, by the by)...

 OK, actually a lot of this stuff is not mine.  Particularly the Nair in the back (the two pink bottles) and the razors toward the center.  Fun fact: one of these items is no longer there.  You do not get a prize for guessing which.

Day 25: Green

No real rhyme or reason to this one.  I was just photographing this quickie crochet project yesterday (it's a baby; I gave it to Bobbie), and realized afterward that the background, which is Esther's frog blanket, is the color of the day...

 The pattern can be found here, by the way.  It was just something fast and cute.  I drew the face on with Linda's markers.  Not sure why I've never done that before.  It actually works really well.

Day 26: Night

So I said to myself, I said "Self, this one is easy.  You can see so many stars out here.  Just go outside and take a picture of the stars!"

I forgot to check the weather report.  It's cloudy.  After several false starts--the ISO setting on my camera for some reason is giving everything a red cast--I came up with this:

Yeah, Baby Girl stays up late.  I'm okay with this, because it means she sleeps late.  She starts getting antsy for Daddy around the time he gets off work.  She will run and stand by the door when she hears the truck, and she was delighted when I took her outside.  She had her minute of cuddling with Erik, and then of course had to come right back to me.

I did it!

I have to wait 12 - 18 business days for my books (apparently, they're print on demand), but I can still access the course website and do the work without 'em.

February Photos, Days Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three: Where I Work & My Shoes

No real excuse for yesterday.  I didn't really have anywhere to work.  I have been meaning to set up a work station, though, so I went ahead & got that done today, when I had the chance:

Heeeyyy...

OK, it's really cheap and dirty, but with luck this will prompt me to treat both my schoolwork and my writing as though it's really important to me, since it is.  Well, my writing is, anyway.  It's just a $35 folding table from Wal-Mart.  I bought a black folding chair & a cushion for about $15 total.  So...$50 later I have a sturdy, serviceable (though not fancy) setup.

Now I just need to buy some printer ink.  Which I totally would have done today, had my mother bothered to tell me we were out of black ink.  We don't print often, but often enough, apparently.

Today's photo...My shoes.  Remember this post, and this one?  The reason I blogged about shoes on those occasions is because I was doing something unusual for me.  Buying shoes.  I don't do it often.  This is because I hate wearing shoes.  Unless it's really really really cold, or I am at the gym, or I am dressed up, I wear sandals.  I buy one pair of sandals and wear them until I can't anymore.

These are the sandals:

I have had them for about a year now. Yeah, they're getting pretty worn.  Most of my Walking the East Side posts were photographed while wearing those sandals.  They have a lot of miles on them, for all that I only wear them when I have to.

I actually looked into getting another pair while at Wal-Mart tonight, but I couldn't find any close enough to these.  There's one particular brand, Earth something-or-other, that I always buy because they're good for walking.  Most sandals, especially women's sandals, have thin soles and become uncomfortable very quickly.  This brand has good support and you can wear them to walk in for miles and miles and miles without them becoming uncomfortable.  It's really quite impressive.  Even within this brand, though, I am picky, because I want slip-on sandals with nothing across the heel, and I don't particularly like thongs.  So it's hard t find them to suit me.  I hope to find another pair closer to these soon.

February Photos, Day Twenty-One: A Favorite Picture of Me

This is why I should have read ahead.  My favorite pictures of myself were mostly included in the self-portrait post.  So I wound up digging in Photobucket, and I found this one, which I do not think I shared on this blog before:

My mother-in-law took this photo of Erik, the girls, & me some months ago (as evidenced by the way that Miss Baby is only a few months old.  I think this is circa January or February 2011).  We're on one of the river barges.  It was our first decent "family picture."

Rick Santorum ATE MY BABY

It was never the dingoes...

I realize the title of my post is complete bullshit.  But so is the content of that article.

This is what Sarah Fister Gale says Rick Santorum is for:

If Rick Santorum had his way, I wouldn’t have been able to get that test, and she most likely would have died. Because according to him, tests that give parents vital information about the health of their unborn children are morally wrong. Though he has no medical training, and no business commenting on the medical decisions that women and their doctors make, he argues that such tests shouldn’t be provided, or that employers at least should be allowed to opt out of paying for them on “moral grounds.”

This is what Santorum actually thinks about the subject:

"People have the right to do it, but to have the government force people to provide it free, to me, is a bit loaded," he said.

And it's not like CNN is a biased conservative source, y'all.

Shit like this is exactly why I so rarely pay attention to liberals these days.  Because they lie.  And then they lie some more.  And then they claim it's the truth, and if you point out that nothing of the sort was ever said, why, don't you know that what was said was just racist code words?

February Photos, Day Twenty: Handwriting

Would you believe I'm queuing up this post at 0104?  No?  Can't say as I blame you.  I am not, however, like to let an easy post escape me.

This is Esther's autograph.  She's a stickymonkey.  The real stickymonkey, because apparently there are numerous counterfeits out there.  Oh, and she's also a ROCK STAR!

(Only Ro's name and, perhaps, the scribbles on the edges, are actually her doing; Bobbie wrote the rest of it.  She's still learning to read and write, but she now does a bang-up job on her name.)

Well, I guess it's a good thing I'm not a liberal then...

You may well have seen this by now: Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids

I guess I'm okay to home school (starting with Marie, danged divorce decree), since I'm conservative.  All the bullshit stuff the author of this article says left-minded people should be concerned with aren't things I'm expected to be concerned with, and all I can say is "Thank God for that."

Nevertheless, I am certain the author extends his disdain to all home schooling--and likely even private schooling--parents.  Hell, he even manages to take a swipe at attachment parenting, while, of course, mischaracterizing that movement as well.  (Wait, is the author a man?  Dana's still a guy's name, right?)

The whole article is worth reading if you want to sample some crazy.  A few choice quotes:

Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive—by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole?

 ...

This overheated hostility toward public schools runs throughout the new literature on liberal homeschooling, and reveals what is so fundamentally illiberal about the trend: It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large.

***

Nor can we allow homeschoolers to believe their choice impacts only their own offspring. Although the national school-reform debate is fixated on standardized testing and “teacher quality”—indeed, the uptick in secular homeschooling may be, in part, a backlash against this narrow education agenda—a growing body of research suggests “peer effects” have a large impact on student achievement. Low-income kids earn higher test scores when they attend school alongside middle-class kids, while the test scores of privileged children are impervious to the influence of less-privileged peers. So when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.

Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. But here’s the great thing about attending racially and socioeconomically integrated schools: It helps children become better grown-ups. Research by Columbia University sociologist Amy Stuart Wells found that adult graduates of integrated high schools shared a commitment to diversity, to understanding and bridging cultural differences, and to appreciating “the humanness of individuals across racial lines.”

 I am so tempted to do a point-by-point fisking of the stupid, but it basically boils down to this: According to Dana Goldstein, you are classist and racist and, worst of all, individualist if you do not put your kids in government schools.  It's for the good of ALL THE KIDS, you see, that your children attend schools of questionable quality.

I will, however, take the time to take great exception to the statements that lower-income kids benefit from going to school with middle-income kids and that integrated high schools make for better adults...While either or both of these assertions may well be true, they're terrifically misleading and don't begin to tell the full story.  For one, I wonder where they're finding these racially-and-economically integrated schools.  To the best of my knowledge, geographically-based school assignments are still by far the norm.  This means that where you live dictates where your kids go to school.  Racial segregation in neighborhoods has become more prominent in most cities, not less, and the largest reason for that is economics.  I rather suspect these integrated schools are few and far between, and I'd be willing to bet they are not the average government school to which this author claims we should all entrust our children.  My high school was racially, and to a lesser extent economically, integrated.  This is because it was a magnet school, so kids from all over the district and (eventually) city were able to attend.  My daughters attend a racially mixed school right now, and it's not a neighborhood school but a charter school.  The school they "should" be attending?  Overwhelmingly black and impoverished.  I don't think Goldstein has the slightest clue about what he (she?) is speaking.  I mean, it's a nice ideal, but it doesn't exist in the real world.

And then there's the other thing that particularly galls me.  Larry Elder wrote about it back in the day; he said that white condescension is worse than black racism.  This article is the very embodiment of that condescension.  Goldstein is the classist here.  Those poor, minority kids are going to be raised up by the presence of your middle class white kids.  Fuck that.  It is utter bullshit.  Kids in poor-performing public schools will only have their lot improved by parents who give a damn about their offspring.  Given his (her?) stated distaste for private schools, I have no doubt there is a concurrent dislike of school voucher programs.  Then there is the inherently classist assumption that poor/single/working parents aren't capable of schooling their children.  In short, Goldstein seems determinedly opposed to the very things proven to improve outcomes for children.

Because it doesn't benefit the collective.  Only failing as a society benefits us all. 

February Photos, Days Eighteen & Nineteen: Drink and Something I Hate to Do

The excuse for being a day behind this time? Esther and I are both sick.  Whatever Erik had is catching, it seems.

Anyway, on to the photos.  Nothing Earth-shattering here, but still pretty interesting.  Well, to me.

First off, Drink.  Now, my friend Lisa is doing this same challenge, but on Facebook like a normal person, and she did a fantastic job on the Drink photo.  She had the headwaters of a river, and a lovely story about going there with her mother as a child and drinking from it.  So...yeah.  Mine is nowhere near that nice.

This is mine:

This is a bottle of Enchanted Rock vodka, made right here in San Antonio, by people who know about getting drunk.  Or something.  We've had this three or four weeks now, and it remains unopened.  I may talk about drinking a lot, but I don't actually do it very often.  But I do have a great deal of loyalty to Texas, even when it comes to my libations.

Next up, something I hate to do.  And this will come as a surprise to absolutely no one.  Here ya go:

I hate to fold laundry.  This is a pile of diapers. I love my diapers.  I even love washing them, and I do not mind hanging them up to dry.  I hate folding them. So, yeah, I usually don't, until it's time to put them on the booty.

And I'm the same with all laundry.

February Photos, Day Seventeen: Time

I'm early!  I was actually considering this while lying abed this morning.  I didn't want to post a picture of a clock or something of the sort, because it's a bit too cliché even for me.

And then I looked at a picture I took yesterday and "got" it.  Today's theme actually requires two pictures:

Yeah, that works...

Lawful Good

I have this problem which seems to affect very few of my friends.  It does affect my husband, which is why he's my husband.

The problem?  I want certain things which I consider morally important, but I want them to be gotten the right way, in concert with our country's laws and traditions.

I have never made a secret of the fact that I support gay marriage.  Gays marrying affects me not one whit, as I'm heterosexual (strangely, most of the people I know over the 'net seem to think I'm bi; women lack a...certain something it requires to capture & hold my sexual interest, but that's neither here nor there).  It doesn't affect the quality or sanctity of my marriage.  It doesn't affect my family, though I suppose it could in the future when the kids are grown.

I am glad to see the spread of marriage equality.  I think Chris Christie is an ass for his promise to veto NJ's marriage equality bill.  I am quite happy that Christine Gregoire signed Washington state's law without cavil.

However, while I appreciate the ends, I am strongly dissatisfied with the means.  WA's marriage bill was voted into place.  Voting on civil rights is a horrible thing; I think it's the greatest argument against direct democracy that exists.

Here's the problem with it: if Washington's vote on marriage equality was legal and acceptable, so was California's Proposition 8.  Both are the will of the people, after all.

What prompts this post is a link posted by a dear friend of mine to Facebook; a link to an online petition apparently entitled "President Obama: Sign the Executive Order Adding LGBT Workplace Protections to Millions of American Jobs - Sign the Petition!"

While I do, in fact, support the idea of ensuring workers are not discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality (and yes, this happens, and it happens a lot, and you should care because gay people wrongly denied jobs or fired from jobs wind up on the dole), I emphatically do not support making this law by executive fiat.

The Constitution rather clearly lays out the process by which laws can be made.  Presidents Gone Wild with the executive order pen doesn't make it acceptable.  If it's that important to you, get in touch with your legislators and get the damned law passed properly.  If nothing else, that would prevent President Santorum from undoing the protection.*


*No, that is not an endorsement.  Or a prediction.  But you know damn good and well he would immediately undo any such order.

February Photos, Days Fifteen & Sixteen: Phone, and Something New

Yeah, I totally forgot about this yesterday.  Instead of blogging, I was out with my best friend.  We saw Safe House and then went to Texas Roadhouse and drank margaritas and tried to forget Safe House.  I have no idea who Ryan Reynolds is, but I know he has only one expression.  Still, it wasn't a bad movie for what it was--a simpleminded action film with vague pretensions to relevance.  And hey, Denzel.  He's my generation's Sean Connery.

Anyhow, I forgot about the February Photo Challenge until I was at home, slightly tipsy, and caring for a sick husband.  I did indeed abandon a sick husband to go watch a movie and drink, but he got prime rib out of it when he came to pick me & Mark up, and in my defense as far as either of us knew he wasn't sick when we went out.  So last night slipped by me.

I did get a good picture earlier this afternoon, though, and another for today as well.  So I'm going to play catch up and try to keep up with it better.

Marie is at that age where she loves phones.  I am at that age where I loathe them.  I do not actually own a phone right now.  Erik has a smartphone that he got for free by extending his T-Mobile contract.  My mother has a cheapie flip phone from Cricket, which is what Rie is playing with in this photo.  I have nothing, and I am happy with it that way.

I actually am old enough to remember when not only were cell phones not ubiquitous, but home phones themselves weren't.  I strongly suspect that po' folks dragged this latter happenstance out for the rest of society, but I remember well the uncertain nature of paying relatives a visit when no one had a phone to call anyone else.  Would they be there, or would a long bus ride be for naught?

As an adult, I rather enjoy the feckless nature of not having a cell phone.  I am an introvert, so I feel no need to be constantly connected to my fellows.  I rather resented that expectation when I did have a cell phone, in fact.  I have said for years, and I stand by it, that unless you are a doctor or a drug dealer, you really don't need to be reachable twenty-four hours a day.

And even most drug dealers sleep.

 Well, this is not 100% new, but it is new to me, so it counts.  "It", by the way, is the diaper Miss Marie is wearing.  I bought a dozen embellished, snap-added prefolds for her from a woman on DiaperSwappers.  Eighteen dollars!  That's a bargain for what it is, believe me.  I almost feel guilty for paying so little for these, but I paid exactly what was asked; I didn't try talking her down any.  I paid what they were worth to her, even though I can see now they're worth more than that to me.  Not that I intend to sell them.  I want more kids; the whole point of cloth diapers to me is that you can use them for more than one child.  Marie is the second child to have these, which makes the cost per item even lower when you stop to think about it.

(And no, I have no qualms buying used cloth diapers.  I see it as no different than cloth diapers I buy new--they get adequately cleaned and sanitized in the wash.  This way, no new resources are used and I don't have to waste water and effort prepping them for first use.)

February Photos, Day Fourteen: Heart

I'm going figurative again here, because a heart? On Valentine's Day?  Yeah, no.  (The only actual heart I've seen today, other than some candies Bobbie gave me, was the one on the gift bag I gave Erik.)

This is a little girl's heart.  Esther loves snakes.  I've said before that she is my uncle reincarnated, & that is one big reason why.  He loved them too.

We went to the rodeo today (just the grounds, not the show itself) and of course had to go see the snake show.  They offered this Texas Indigo and another snake up for petting once it was over.  I had to pull Esther off the other one so someone else could have a chance to pet it; the only way I could get her to move was to point her toward this one.  She was elated when the snake did this, and even happier when the man holding it said the snake was giving her a valentine.

February Photos, Day Thirteen: Blue

OK, I'll be the first to admit that today's a cop-out.  But it's also a chance to brag, so I'm going with it.

This is a photo.  It's the sky, as viewed from the parking lot of Erik's workplace.  There were some puffy white clouds this morning, but it cleared up beautifully.

Yesterday was pretty chilly, especially with the wind.  It only hit something like 43°, and with the stiff breeze (20mph or so) it felt much colder.  Yes, yes, I know.  It gets ridiculously cold in other parts of the country.  That's why I don't live in other parts of the country, mmkay?  There was, apparently, sleet in parts of the city during the morning hours, and even snow flurries (nothing stuck, of course).

Anyway, that was yesterday.  This is today.  Clear blue sky, temps in the mid-sixties.  It's the darnedest thing.  Even though I grew up here, I'm not really used to it.  I don't think I ever will be. 

Tomorrow, we celebrate Valentine's Day by going to the rodeo.  It's forecast to hit 72°.  I'm old-fashioned; I like my rodeo frigid.  The warmth will be nice all the same.  (We're actually just going to the stock show.  The performer lineup this year sucks.)

February Photos, Day Twelve: Inside of the Closet

Today's photo is supposed to be the inside of my closet.  Only problem?  I don't have one.  There is a closet in this room, but we can't get the door open.  I don't know why.  It's not locked; the handle just spins.  Anyway, I took a photo of the inside of a drawer instead.  So you can see my mad organizational skills in action:

Yeah, it's about like that.  Let's see: knitting needles, a baby-chewed CD case (I'd like to punch whomever decided to make them out of cardboard), my Kindle in its cover, two bottles of nail polish, nail art pens, my crappy digital camera, a lipstick tube, and my thermometer.  Plus other random crap.

Color me shocked...

The church service I used to go to--y'know, the one whose celebrant I dealt with here and here--is going bye-bye.  I got the e-mail Friday.

Officially, the reasoning is:

Changes in St. Mark’s clergy leadership make it impossible to assign one priest to weekly serve that community alone.  Leadership needs such as music and A/V technology team, planning and creativity team, readers and chalice bearers, and set up teams, have challenged the resources of the worshipping community.  And, significantly, the schedule of the worship service on Sunday morning makes it “compete” with other services at St. Mark’s - a competition that helps no one.  

That, as the formatting suggests, is an actual quote from the e-mail, which goes on to explain that, after the end of Epiphany, the 11:11 CAYA service will go away, and during Lent will become a midweek "creative worship offering" which will "explor(e) the Lenten themes of journey, risk, challenge, and creativity in new ways, in new places, with new offerings of music, art and movement."  (It might be worth noting that, when I was much younger, Wednesday evening services were the more laid-back offerings.  I will go so far as to say they were the progenitor of IT/CAYA services, and far predate Rev. Wickham.)

My immediate thought, I must admit, was Huh, finally alienated all your regulars, did you? Perhaps I am flattering myself, but I do not see this as being too far from the truth.  Even before I was made unwelcome, I had noticed many of the service's founding parishioners had begun attending irregularly or not at all.

The truth about CAYA is that a handful of people ran the whole blessed thing, and though lip service was paid to involving everybody, it didn't.  No ideas were entertained unless they came from one of the three couples who ran the show.  Not exactly a recipe for success.

February Photos, Day Eleven: Makes Me Happy

This is another one that is just impossible to do in one picture.  I thought about it, but no.  Too narrow.

In no particular order:

Miss Esther, my warrior princess, makes me happy when she shows off her quirky side.

Good beer and good barbecue--and my family to share the meal with--makes me happy.

My four little butt-monkeys make me incredibly happy.

Having a baby whose hair is long enough to put up makes me happy.  Her sisters stayed bald until age two, or longer.

Fresh yarn makes me happy.  Especially when it's obtained at a great discount.  Those skeins of Fisherman's Wool?  Paid $5 each, and they're normally $12 each.

Books make me happy.  These are some (but far from all) of the books I've bought over the last year.  It's a somewhat misleading photograph, as most of what's there isn't fiction, and most of what I read is.  But they're mine, and I get to read them whenever I want.  That makes me happy.  I have always been a bookworm, even when it wasn't cool.  Yeah, I'm the kid who got made fun of in school for reading constantly.  Didn't care then.  Still don't.  Books are good.

Being with my guy makes me really happy. (This was Wurstfest, which is why we're holding random crap.)

February Photos, Day Ten: Self Portrait

I'm going to have a bit of fun with this one.  None of these are new pictures, but they're all photos I really like.

This was my first Blogger profile photo; I took it in Hawaii, with the camera propped up on my desk, sitting on the floor with my back to the couch.  I don't know why that seemed like a good idea, but it did.

I was...hmm...Twenty-five?  'Round about that age, anyhow.  I am pretty sure I was pregnant with Esther, or maybe I'd just had her.  So, 24 or 25.  I look really young to me here.

 This was my profile picture for a while.  Me and the older girls.  I'm not real sure about the vintage of this one--'08, I think, but don't quote me.  It looks like that because I set the camera on my bedside table that at the time held a high-velocity fan, so the wind's in our faces.

This is the large version of my current profile shot.  It's a couple of years old; I am pretty sure I took it in 2009, slightly before my 30th birthday.  This represents about the only time the whole "hold the camera at arm's length & hit the shutter button" thing ever worked out for me.  My hair is still really long, by the way; it's just put up here.  I usually look like this, more or less, because unless it's chilly out, my hair is pulled back.  Long hair loose is like having a cat on your neck.

This is another, rare, arm's length shot.  I wanted a picture of me holding Marie to put on Facebook.  When she was tiny, my chest was actually her favorite place to sleep.  None of the older girls would ever sleep up there, but Marie loved it.  She still will sometimes, but she's well over 20lbs now and that makes it hard to breathe.

 Similar to the other one.  Me and all the girls.  This was from September of last year, and looks like it was probably taken with the webcam on Erik's old computer, then run through Pixlr-o-Matic.

Last one, from earlier this year.  New glasses that look a whole lot like the old glasses (glasses & hair see very little change from me).  As I said in the Facebook caption: Red lipstick & a Spurs shirt. All I need now is 6" of bangs hairsprayed up in the air & I've got the quintessential SA look.

February Photos, Day Nine: Front Door

Luckily for me, it doesn't say anything about being my  front door.  So I present to you, the front door of the restaurant where the girls and I ate dinner tonight:

I'm quite fond of this place, though I rarely remember it when we're thinking of somewhere to eat.  It's on McCullough just north of downtown.  Armadillo's.  Really, really good burgers, though the grilled chicken sandwich I ate tonight wasn't anything to turn your nose up at.

As a side note, what is it about kids and chicken strips?  Linda would eat nothing else, if I'd let her, and the other two are nearly as bad.