Back to Normal, but with a dog.

Kate was only in Saint Louis for roughly 18 hours. She came, she saw, she got her eyebrows threaded. At 6:00 AM on Saturday, she left us for a better party. The Wheadons were in Denver for the Stock show, and even though Kate has never previously expressed interest in livestock, she's smart enough to know where there Wheadons are, the fun is.

My mom and dad are now also home in Salt Lake. We had a nice visit, even if it was on the short side. But the exciting thing is that Caesar stayed here. He's adjusting well to the new environment. He was barking at the front door in the middle of the night, but other than that he's been pretty calm.

The greatest entertainment from my parents' visit came from menu confusion. On Friday, we ate lunch at Sweetie Pie's. They had really loud live music going. You literally had to yell across the service line to place your order. My dad saw Buffalo on the board, and it's too loud to ask questions, so he went for it. Turns out Buffalo is Buffalo fish, not bison. My dad described it as carp-like with more bones than flesh. The rest of the food at Sweetie Pie's was great. We were really there for the macaroni and cheese, which I'm sure is half butter.

After he had given up on eating the Buffalo fish, he googled it. This fish looks a lot like carp too. It also carries the risk of giving you Haff Disease, which there was an outbreak of in St. Louis last year. Once he'd made it a few hours past ingestion, he knew he was in the clear.

The next day we went to another place featured on the Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives." It was called Iron Barley and is in the traditionally German area of town. Their menu had no descriptions, just names, which is not all that helpful when the names are "Hill Pig" or other similarly ambiguous monikers. I settled on the Monte Cristo. It's the sandwich that I only get to each about every five years at the Blue Bayou in Disneyland. What I missed though is that it was under the hot dog heading. So it came and I was totally surprised that it was a hot dog. Nick wasn't. He said, "Yeah, I was a little shocked when you ordered a hot dog."

Knowing I don't eat hot dogs, you think he might have mentioned his surprise during the ordering process. But he didn't and the hot dog came. We debated what exactly made it a Monte Cristo, and the only thing we could come up with was the dollop of jam it came with. It was probably a lot funnier if you were there.