Revival - November 24, 2015
I need to take more vacations next year. This thought popped up when I looked at my PTO balance. I don’t get an excessive amount, I just don’t take off the time, or travel, as much as I should. I had to use up a few days or lose them, so I made the week of Thanksgiving basically a full week off, I went in for a work lunch on Monday to celebrate a coworker’s birthday, but beyond that, I was off.
I knew I’d be writing a bit, and doing some code, but I can only do those so many hours in the day. So I did what I like to do on most days I have off, I volunteered with Open Arms.
The only experience I’d had delivering with Open Arms during the week was the week prior when delivering frozen turkeys with the fixings for a Thanksgiving meal, that wasn’t too bad. Saturdays are normally pretty laid back too. I wasn’t prepared for the orchestration that goes on for weekday deliveries. It’s quite an amazing sight: cars coming in, parking, grabbing their carts, loading up, and other cars bringing in the carts when the first car leaves its parking spot. Open Arms does an amazing job of managing the whole thing.
I usually try to pick different areas of town to deliver to with most deliveries, I want to see all parts of town, and the various neighborhoods with their associated people. It drives home, to me, how interconnected and similar everybody is, if you just stop to look.
A side effect of volunteering, and already being in Minneapolis around lunchtime, was that I was able to make it into Revival for lunch. Standard hour to two-hour waits for dinner become no waits or a few minutes for lunch, especially if you’re willing to sit at the bar. (I just wish their bar stools had backs.)
½ Bird Tennessee Hot Chicken and Hoppin’ John: What’s there to say? The chicken is still amazing. The Hoppin’ John is a great dish with a combination of flavors and textures.
Chess Pie: This was interestingly serendipitous. It was the one-year anniversary of the first time I personally baked a pie. That pie variety? Chess pie. I think I need to make mine again to make sure it’s not just nostalgia, but I think mine competes with this one, and this one is really good.