You probably already know what I’m talking about. There is a theory out there (not fact, yet as I’ve disproven this, once.) that states that the grimier the Chinese food place, the better it is. This is not to say that clean places have bad food, but the grubby ones are almost always incredible. Case in point-

Big Bowl rules. The food is awesome, amazingly fresh, and when they say spicy, they MEAN spicy.  Problem is, the wait is always giant, and it’s like 15$ a plate for some chow. Not my idea of Chinese food, or at least, typical Chinese. It’s quite possibly more authentic than MOST typical Jade Dragon Wok type places, but you know what I mean. I’m talking about the little hole in the wall joint that no one is EVER in, but the food is drop dead amazing. These are the places that you always wonder how they stay in business, til you get an order of chow from them. There are a few of these by me.

Tai Lan- AMAZING Egg rolls. I just tried this for the first time the other night. My wife was in the mood for Chinese and had eaten here before, proclaiming the fried rice to be made of win. Now, fried rice is pretty hard to screw up. She has this thing where it has to have pineapple in it, (I know, it’s weird. But I’m married to her, so this is one of the party quirks that I have to accept) and a lot of places around here give her weird looks. So she decided one night to try Tai Lan. This place is scary enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat there. It’s pretty close to old Inver Grove, which I tend to avoid if I can. It’s near the Bike King, and the Bike King is awesome, so I knew of its existence. Anyhow, wifey wanted to get some chinese…. so she went there. She picked up a couple orders of chicken fried rice, with pineapple, and grabbed a couple of egg rolls. I was skeptical at first, and then, took a bite. Before I knew it, 3 out of the 5 egg rolls were gone, and I was contemplating eating the 4th and 5th. In other words, the sketchiest place in the world happened to have the most rad food ever. So, if you suspect you may get food poisoning from a food establishment, eat there. You may still blow a gasket, but it will be totally worth it.

No freakin clue why. Not like my life is terribly interesting. I don’t do random things like spend multiple thousands of dollars on car parts on a whim or anything like that. Ive only had a hit taken out on me once. Last time I was in the ER, they made me wear the dreaded BH scrubs, because I actually went fucking crazy. So, Expect to see more randomness as time goes on, because I suspect that Ill be post more rants frequently. You may see updates on my car, you may see updates on my life, you may hear about the incident with the sawzall.

I read a thread on another forum recently found here. http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=257985

It’s frickin hilarious. Some of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and also the most horrifying. But this made me think. You see, my wife has chronic kidney stones. It sucks, because about every 6 months or so, I end up in an ER myself. Combined with my work experience, I have learned a few things about ER’s and healthcare in general. Here goes.

#1. ER’s can be fun, but you have to make it work for you. For instance-

One of the first times I visited the ER as an adult, was actually on my own. You see, a friend of mines’ husband had taken exception with me as a whole. This later manifested itself with him doing his damndest to implant his fist in my skull. He’s a bit of the jealous type. As a result, I was left with some pretty serious bruising on my face, a nice little cut on my forehead, and some other assorted fun stuff. There is quite a bit more to this story, but that can be told another time. Anyhow, I learned, levity is the single best weapon you have in the ER. When you check in at 3am, the nurses are burned out. No one wants to work overnight shift, and the people you get in there at that time are “interesting” to say the least. So, a little humor goes a LONG way. Here I am bleeding from my head, with a possible skull fracture, likely a concussion, and who knows what else. I walked in, and asked the charge nurse at the desk to guess what I was here for. Her not missing a beat went with “You must be here for a colonoscopy!” I couldn’t have played that one better myself. We shared a hearty laugh, and I got my check in checkup as it were. As I was brought in the back (with the assistance of my brother. I was a little wobbly) I continued to crack jokes. I thought this was the funniest damn thing on earth. In turn the nurses on staff got quite the kick out of it as well. Most people come in moaning and crying over a stubbed toe, and here I am, skull totally toasted, looking like I just survived a car crash, thinking this is the funniest damn thing in the world. Every so often a CNA or nurse or the staff doc would wander by, and they had to poke their head in. I alternated between my cell phone (taking care of business) and making fun of my mess. Even the police officer that was there dropping off another “find” had to appreciate it. He had his digi cam, and we got pics of the whole incident.  By the end of the night, I had everyone in stitches (Including myself. 7 of them in fact) and enjoying it. I went home feeling good. To the nurses that put up with my insanity, you made my year.

#2. Pay attention to what the doctors are doing.

One of my lady’s many trips to the ER almost ended very poorly. We had gone to an unnamed suburban ER for another one of her kidney pain episodes. Fortunately for us, it was a day time visit for once, but we still had to go. As is the status quo, it was the middle of winter, and it was cold as hell. Anyhow, onto the doc. He was about ready to send her home with a load of pain meds and call it a day. She, being the persistent one, was not satisfied with this. She wanted to make sure they had talked to her urologist before this happened, so the urologist could confirm that she was good to go. The doc hemmed and hawed, but finally we prevailed. A 5 minute conversation with the urologist later, and we were on our way to ANOTHER hospital, with an open OR, where the wife was scheduled for immediate stone removal. 3 hours and two dozen stones later, we were good. The moral of this story? Make damn sure that if you KNOW the doc has missed something, speak up. He isn’t going to know unless you tell him, and sometimes it takes an outside pair of eyes to make sure that stuff goes well, or correctly in this case. God only knows what would have happened had they sent her home.

#3. Know everyone you can.

The LAST time we were at the hospital, we learned this one. As it turns out, a woman that I had used to work with had married a doctor, that HAPPENED to be the attending on the surgery the lady was scheduled for that day. While this didn’t really provide any tangible benefit, it made me feel a lot better. I knew from my conversations with the other staff, and knew that this guy knows what’s up. To the docs, I thank you.

I’m sure that there is more to this that I am forgetting, but you get the idea. Also, therapy dogs ROCK. I was sitting in the ER for about the 50th time, when a couple ladies came in with some dogs. These weren’t terribly “special” dogs, not purebred, not gigantic, not anything special. They were mad friendly though, and I tell you what, it made me SO much more mellow just to be able to cool out with these dogs, it was unreal. I think I spent nearly two hours petting on these dogs, and by the time they had to go, we were done. To the two ladies with the awesome therapy dogs, I am planning on one because of you.

I read a statistic today. This statistic was that 1 in 11 kids in either MN (or the US, doesn’t really matter where) do not get enough to eat. That means, almost 10 percent of the adolescent population does not get a full meal all the time, or sometimes, not at all. This is lame. Hungry kids do stuff. They steal, beg, and do whatever they have to do to get some chow. This in turn teaches them that no one is going to help them. No one is going to bring them a warm dinner, a blanket, a shoulder to rest their heads on when they’re sick. This is lame. Because as adults, we tend to use what we learned as children in our decision making as adults. Meaning, if you stole so you could get a loaf of bread or some green beans as a kid, you would likely steal again as an adult. Not completely your fault, as it’s all you’ve ever known. Hopefully you’d be smart enough to think that MAYBE theivery was a bad idea, and go on to better ways of making money, like a job. A lot of times, this doesn’t happen though, and we start breeding criminals. Sure, it seems innocent enough. Kid swipes a frozen dinner for him and kid sister. Next thing you know, he’s graduated to stealing video games from Best Buy. From there, you got your auto theft, your home invasion, on up to white collar crimes. Embezzlement is fun everyone! Wait, no. No embezzling. That’s bad.

Now, what do we do about this? Sure, there is the work food drive, the home food drive, the donations from big corporations. Everyone pitches in dough around the holidays so that single and underpaid parents alike can feed their kids the typical Thanksgiving meal, complete with a turkey and stuffing. This is great, for that one night of the year. Maybe even a few nights, as turkey leftovers tend to go a long ways. But, what happens after that meal? Kids go right back to starving, having to rely on an already overrun food supply system that is seeing increases in need from the economic fallout on an exponential basis. And then I got to thinkin……

Child obesity is at an all time high. More and more kids are turning off the bike, and on the Xbox. Less and less are our kids getting out there for exercise, and sitting in front of the TV longer. There are many contributing factors to this. More parents are afraid of kids getting injured or kidnapped, forcing them to limit the childs’ activities in the interest of safety. So, no more going out to play until the street lights come on, but if you’re lucky, you’ll have a play date next month. There is also the increased stress on parents, where instead of making a decent dinner, they stop at the McDonalds and get the kids Happy Meals. All in all, less activity all around. When you do less, realistically you should eat less, right? I mean, you could simply say, run around the back yard for a while, but we all know better than that. So that brings us to less food. Maybe you don’t eat that box of Twinkies, or maybe you only eat a serving of Hamburger Helper instead of 3.  Suddenly, we have a surplus of food sitting in our cupboards, doing nothing. So, what do you think we do with this food? How about…. we give it to the starving kids? It all works! Starving kids get to eat chow, and not steal from me. Fat kids eat less chow, and stop workin’ over my tax bill for health programs to make fat kids less fat!

I tell you, sometimes, I’m a genius.

So several months ago, there was a chili contest at work. Me, having a sick sense of humor, entered. Now if you’ve ever met me in real life, I take spicy food as a challenge. I’ve completed the Buffalo Wild Wings Blazin’ challenge. I was going to attempt back to back, but everyone else got bored. Safe to say, I like it hot. Anyhow, we had this chili contest, and I came in second. Normally I’d have been ok with this, but I swear, it was rigged. EVERY judge from that contest had stated that I had the best chili, even if I had made them sweat a bit. My reply to this was, I ran out of peppers.They cried. Anyhow, I came in second, to some sort of bland, chili-ish mixture. It had beans, it had some sort of flavor, there was meat, but yeah. TOTALLY forgettable. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that due to the WILD success of the first chili contest, we would be having more cookoffs. My plan was set.

I was going to make the single HOTTEST batch of chili I could muster. I wasn’t going for the win here, I was going for pain. The kind of pain that makes you question the sanity of the creator. The kind of pain that comes with warnings. The kind of pain that requires 3 bottles of milk and a shot of Novocaine to get over. Freakin’ PAIN. What happened next was a little odd. I won. Somehow, out of 4 contestants, I came in first. I was the recipient of a Walmart gift card, which is going to buy me a video game in the next hour or so, once I leave work. Probably Fallout 3, unless my car slips and I get Gears 2 instead.

But what was in this chili, you ask? Well, here is the recipe, in its entireity. Not one bit of it was plagairized from another chef, hell, I made it up as I went along. And yes, there really is bacon in it.

Keep in mind, this is directly from the email I sent to a co worker, and is officially the first recipe I have ever written. Total cost, about 30$. Watching my supervisors sweat, priceless. And I have an excuse to spend money on me now!