every year to say “thanks” parkview baptist church takes its ministers out to a swank restaurant. tonight was the scheduled date for this year’s culinary “thanks”. i always love this date. i love the fact that our church is this nice. i love eating with all the other ministers and their spouses / dates. i love the jokes that come out of it. i love the fact that it is the one time a year that i eat at a really nice restaurant. i am basically a man with pretty common tastes. if i have to choose a restaurant to eat at it’s going to most likely be “riverside patty.” i’m pretty much a “low brow” type of guy and therefore stick to resturants that are a step or two below the resturants that we go to for the “pastor appericiation meal”. with this said it�s still fun to do it once a year. tonight we went to the capitol restaurant in the bankone building.
the food was excellent, the service was great, the company was very enjoyable. the whole evening was fun. i was however perplexed by one item during the evening. i heard a rumor that the urinals within their bathrooms were different from the typical bathroom fixture. I went to investigate this and found out that it wasn�t that they were different in their make from a normal, everyday urinal, rather they were stocked differently. the capital restaurant took ordinary, plain-jane urinals and filled them with ice. now i know i probably sound like a big, backwoods, redneck saying this but i�ve never used the bathroom on ice before. this was an entirely new experience for me. i thought the whole concept was a little odd. kind of like writing your name in the snow, only inside.
if you do a search on askjeeves.com on why in the world people would put perfectly good ice into a urinal you find out that it reduces the ammonia smell of the pee. it�s done at nicer restaurants (apparently because the average urinal cake is less ritzy than ice). i had actually kind of already figured that much out before asking jeeves, but it was nice to have confirmation of the fact. so basically i can now determine the quality of the restaurant by checking out it�s bathroom. ice equals top quality dining establishment, while urinal cakes equal a restaurant of lower quality.
of course, this means that if you�re a guest at my house and you find ice instead of blue water in the john, then we are putting out the red carpet for you.
p.s. thanks again parkview for a wonderful evening. your pastors (including me) really appreciate ya’ll.