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Principia

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Everything posted by Principia

  1. Unless Stella's is moving and completely redecorating, they're gone gone gone. Rasmus is currently auctioning off all of their stuff, right down to the old-timey bathroom signs.
  2. In the immortal words of Cecil Adams, "Behold this creature that walks like a man. It wants ketchup on its hot dog."
  3. Not that any of the fine people here would do this, but for the love of gravy if you are two individual people taking a nice, l o n g, leisurely time picking at your salads and conversing with one another, do you mind sitting at the same table instead of spacing your tables well apart and taking up half of the flipping lounge area? Sorry, the +1 enjoyed dinner in the bar at Corduroy on Friday night, and there were these two singletons sucking up at least half of the couch space between the two of them. No skin off our noses, but between the pregnant woman who had to haul up onto a bar seat and the large group who had to cram at two tables in the back corner (it would've been one, but we gladly moved over to help them out), we were about ready to go over and smack said singletons upside the head with a rolled up newspaper. Preferably the Sunday Los Angeles Times... but we didn't want Rissa to have to fill out a police report.
  4. I was lucky to get my food and be done eating it by the time the store closed. We bought one piece of fish and that was it.
  5. The +1 and I ventured there yesterday evening. I'm willing to chalk up some of the roughness in service to it being a brand-new store, but a few observations:If they want to compete with Wegmans, closing several hours earlier in general and shutting down the prepared food "restaurants" an hour earlier isn't going to do it. I personally saw at least a dozen people being turned away - rather forcefully, as a matter of fact - from the various stations at 8 o'clock on the dot. And every one of those folks that I saw threw up their hands and left. And I'm pretty sure they were leaving the store entirely, based on the grumblings I was hearing. I can certainly appreciate that WF doesn't want to have people moseying up to the stations as they're trying to close the store, but unless people are wandering around the store reading the rather small signs at each station indicating they roll up at 8, people won't expect them to be closed that early. Since there's no WF in the immediate area, I'm pretty sure most people aren't expecting the store to close at 9 either. Hint to the managers: if you want people out of your restaurants' hair as soon as possible after 8, make sure that your order-takers actually give the orders to the cooks and have them acknowledged, versus taking the last few orders down, chucking the pad vaguely in the direction of the cook's station, and then changing into one's civvies and running so quickly out the door that one would think the building was on fire... leaving the cooks to stare blankly at the people still waiting at the station for their orders. We waited almost 15 minutes and had to ask when our food was coming - and if we hadn't, neither us nor the woman who ordered right before us would've gotten our food. The layout of the prepared foods areas, especially vis a vis the seating? Poor to the point of making me want to approach the store's designer, grab them by the shoulders, and ask them "What were you thinking?!" There is almost no seating at the stations themselves, and no real waiting area either... which means that anyone who can't get a seat at a station ends up unavoidably hovering over whomever is seated there. All of the other seating involves having to go through the store's main checkout line space to get to it. The largest section of seating is right across from the exit, which means that if it's cold out diners are subjected to howling arctic breezes about every minute and a half. Even better is that the entrance most people will probably come in from is the one that comes through the osteria. So anyone coming from that side has to try to enter the prepared-foods area of the store backwards through the express checkout area.
  6. They're not especially near one another. If you look up the Dick's Sporting Goods in Fair Lakes (12501 Fair Lakes CircleFairfax, VA 22033) and use that address, that should tell you whether it's feasible for you.
  7. It might be a matter of public information via FOIA, but that doesn't mean that the patented item is free for commercial use by other entities (like websites who make a healthy dime off ads and "donations"). That's why, say, Jenny Craig can't use that formula to determine how to tell their subscribers what to eat... not that they do that anyway, since the whole point of their system is for you to buy their food. What they do use is the old (patent expired) exchange system that WW pioneered way back in the day, and that the gummint themselves now use.
  8. It may be more complete than the WW books, but she also obtains a lot of copyrighted information from Weight Watchers and then posts it on her site in one form or another, because she's stated her belief that all of that information should be available to everyone in the world for "free," never mind that it actually cost WW time and money to develop it... or that she herself is making money off the site.
  9. The manner in which points are calculated has not changed. What has changed is that they now do a better job of taking metabolic differences due to age, gender, and everyday level of activity into account when determining one's appropriate point count. So for instance, a desk jockey and a UPS driver would now have different point levels, even if they were the same weight, height and gender.
  10. I can't avow for the scenester rating of the place, since the +1 and I only ever go during the week. Service can indeed be spotty, especially if one is not padding one's bill with the purchase of alcoholic beverages.The sushi is good but better can definitely be had (and often for cheaper) elsewhere. The real attraction would be the not-sushi menu items such as the Obi Shiru.
  11. Maybe I had a bad batch the first time I tried it - it tasted like carbonated soy sauce, and everyone with me at the party in question agreed. As for DC itself, the version with Splenda is much better than the original, although they've yet to produce a caffeine-free version (drat it all).For me, the Queen Mother of all diet drinks would have to be Boylans Diet Cream Soda. Their Diet Birch Beer comes in a close second, but I can almost never find it around here. My daily diet soda of choice is Caffeine Free Diet Dr. Pepper.
  12. In fact, sensible diet/lifestyle plans (including Weight Watchers) stress that you should continue to consume a small amount of good fats such as olive oil (along the lines of 2 tsp. per day). They're necessary for any number of bodily processes, including processing fat-soluble vitamins and boosting one's HDL levels. Butter, pork fat and duck fat do not qualify as good oils - although at least they're better than trans fats. As for Scott's recommendation to split your meal, that's something the +1 and I do all the time. If we don't want the same thing, we'll set aside half (and sometimes more) of our entrées to be taken home. In addition to keeping your portions reasonable, we've found it encourages ordering healthier preparations of dishes - a lot of the heavier preparations (e.g., frying) don't produce good leftovers.
  13. I'd be cheating terribly to join this, as the +1 and I have been actively on Weight Watchers since the summer. We've each dropped about 20% of our respective body weights (although I'm only about 1/3 to goal), so I know the kind of loss Don is talking about is doable - even without the exercise component, about which we've been woefully slack thus far. I can't imagine how much harder this lifestyle change would've been if we weren't teetotallers, though, so my hat goes off especially to the oenophiles who are just beginning their efforts. Here's to a happier and healthier 2007 for all of you and yours! Edited to add: Don himself has spoken, so I guess I'm in! Is there a particular charity we might want to focus on for our group donation come Memorial Day?
  14. Gee, if I'd been to Germany and eaten there I might feel qualified to suggest whether the US outlets might be any good or not, but having only seen a website in German I guess I don't really feel in a position to pronounce either that it's going to be terrible or otherwise resemble some unrelated chain I don't like. Could we please, for once, stop picking on some place that hasn't even opened yet? We sound like the "cool" kids' table at a junior high cafeteria passing summary judgment on any other children that happen to walk by and incur our undeserved wrath.
  15. It is a shame, and it is indeed deadly serious - not just for younger children, either. A student at Herndon High (or it might've been Oakton; it's been several years) died after eating a cookie off a plate in the school secretary's office - it turned out later that the cookie she ate hadn't had nuts, but that there had been cookies with nuts on the same plate earlier in the day, and some crumbs/dust ended up on the cookie the student ate.Some schools have taken it to the point that they actually have classes and cafeterias that are segregated by the kids' allergies. And that's somewhat understandable - if parents of non-allergic kids are up in arms because they can't give their kids PB&Js, can you imagine how they'd react upon being told that they're not allowed to feed their kids anything with nuts for breakfast or take them to someplace that serves peanuts like Five Guys, just because their kid might then track peanut fragments in on their shoes or jacket?
  16. I'm going to add to those suggesting Weight Watchers, if you feel you need either some structure or a support network. Many of the non-WW suggestions have aligned with some of what WW would tell you anyway (e.g., eat plenty of vegetables, drink enough water). I'm doing Weight Watchers without the meetings (the +1 attends meetings at his place of employ); he and I are each down about 40 pounds so far, and that's with us being really slack about the exercise component. We're doing Flex Points rather than Core. A heads-up on the WW Flex Points plan: they are rejiggering how point requirements are calculated in order to better account for gender, age, and general levels of physical activity. The new matrix is going to come out at the start of December. If you've got any specific questions, feel free to PM me or just post 'em here.
  17. The +1 and I noted this myself when we wandered past over the weekend. Given that several of the pieces were either return-receipt requested, power bills, or notifications for pickup of registered items, I'm guessing they're G-O-N-E. But the customer service desk says they were told it's supposed to reopen in "a couple of weeks," so who knows?
  18. I'm afraid I don't, but I did dine once with a friend at a team-waited establishment where they tried to take away his salad plate no fewer than five times in a 10-minute period - when he was obviously not done with it. The fifth time one of the waiters approached the table he just held his knife blade-up in front of it and stared them down until they buggered off. His original idea was to stab them with a fork, but the +1 and I talked him out of it.
  19. Back in the late '70s when my family first moved to the area, that's where the 'rents would take us for Italian food. It looked like a mafia hangout then, and it still does - at least from the outside. I haven't been inside since I was a wee lass. This might, of course, be why certain relatives of mine from New Jersey had recommended the place to my mother, but who's to say?
  20. I grew up in the Tylenol-tampering era, back when hospital emergency rooms offered the service of parents bringing in their kids' candy to be x-rayed. So, no, no homemade anything for me. And sad to say, if I were a parent I wouldn't let my children eat anything that even appeared homemade unless it were from someone I knew and trusted.
  21. If additional chapters in our families' versions of A Series of Unfortunate Events don't crop up, the +1 and I would love to join the group.
  22. Interesting is one way to put it. "When I grow up, I want to be the corporate grind in charge of turnover maintenance at Crapplebee's," is another. Not that I'm at all a lingerer, but I thought part of the entire point of eating at a place of higher caliber is the right to not be pushed in and out of the restaurant like so much cattle being processed through an abattoir.
  23. And the inimitable hot fluffernutter and banana combo. I think one of the local sammich joints does this with Nutella in there too.I always found the peanut butter and honey worked a lot better with spun honey.
  24. I'll see your flower-shaped egg mold and raise you one 3-in-1 Coffee Maker/Toaster Oven/Grill! And to avoid quipping... mdt, you need to check out this site!
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