Over lunch today, I considered my eating habits of yesteryear and that led me to consider how far I’ve come recently in breaking out of certain ruts I used to gleefully adhere to.

When I was a young boy, eating out meant dining on grilled cheese sandwiches. It didn’t matter where we were, I wanted my grilled cheese sandwiches. Mind you, our little family didn’t exactly enjoy haute cuisine at the best of times. Small-town Washington state, living on welfare most of the time, you know the drill. At home I learned to make two things: grilled cheese sandwiches and baked mac-and-cheese.

One magical day (which wasn’t, of course, magical enough for me to actually remember now) someone introduced me to the French Dip. I never looked back. I would only eat roast beef sandwiches dipped in au jus from then on when dining out. At home, of course, I stuck with grilled cheese sandwiches and mac-and-cheese.

Au jus wasn’t the sort of thing Mom would pick up from the store, you know? Nevermind the roast beef and the sandwich rolls.

The story of dining out is, for me, a slow series of these discoveries. In almost every case, someone had to browbeat me to the point where I would “just try it.” To say that I’m not the most adventurous soul on the planet may, in fact, be a gross understatement. By adulthood (or thereabouts) I amassed a small collection of dishes I was willing to eat, and would usually eat the same thing whenever I went to a particular restaurant.

Okay, that part hasn’t changed too much in the last few years, but I’m getting better. Part of the “new me” process I began a half dozen or so years ago involves trying new dishes. More and more often I make a point of ordering something from the menu that I haven’t tried previously, and even when I’ve narrowed a restaurant’s menu down to “here’s what I like, to heck with the rest” I generally rotate through those options so I’m not just doing the same-old same-old every visit.

It’s possible that I think too much about food. Or I think too much about what I think too much about. Maybe I just think too much about what other people think. Whatever the case, I think I’m glad that I’m branching out, however slowly and slightly, as I grow older. It’s better that than to calcify in my ways, right?

A package awaited my arrival home last night. “Wait,” I said to myself, “I didn’t order anything from Amazon!”

Somebody, apparently, did:

A Midnight Oil single and a Tony Banks solo album! Imports, even! (See the stickers?) Don’t mind me, I’m just going to go all fanboy for a few minutes… and then I’ll give these babies a spin. (Reviews forthcoming? Most likely.)

I don’t think I’ll count Sunday night’s sleep. I almost always get insomnia on Sunday night, so let’s just let that slide for now. Let’s talk about Monday.

M-O-N… (“N is the Number of times we’ve wanted to throttle someone today!”) D-A-Y… (“Y? Why do we put ourselves through this week after week?”) S-U-C-K-S…

Let’s see… it all started, I think, with the medium-sized brown spider in my bathroom, the one that was up in the corner above the shower until it decided that my side of the bathroom (the part with the toilet, where I was sitting) was MUCH more interesting. This brown, fast-moving medium-sized spider could tread water, I might add. (He ended up above the shower again, where I managed to knock him down from the ceiling into the tub of running water, in which the little bastard didn’t have the decency to drown for a full two minutes.)

Then there was the housefly (I’ve NEVER had one of those in my room, so why now?)… and the random bug I couldn’t quite identify, before OR after I squashed it with my shoe. All I know is that it had long legs and what looked sort of like mottled wings.

It was standing room only on the bus, which was late so I had the “pleasure” of running for the MAX… on which it was also standing room only. This morning’s commute also convinced me never to switch to taking my bike on the train; seven bicyclists jockeyed for position in the front car, and each car is only designed to carry four bikes reasonably. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that some of the bicyclists in this town can be un-reasonable.

Work wasn’t awful, really, though almost every service call involved either something I couldn’t fix or something that someone broke through sheer stupidity. Well, that’s not true. I did make a laptop “all better” during the middle part of the day. That, folks, was my major contribution to humanity today.

Tomorrow, however, will be a better day: It’s my daughter’s birthday…