Mimi and Pepaw at the fountain

We eat every weekend fairly often at a cute Mexican place. It's very nice... it's a sit down place and everything. You just have to go through the line first and get your number. They display your order number when it's ready on a jumbotron flat panel tv, which is an improvement over the staff barking out order numbers on a P.A. system... sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. It's a get your own stuff sort of place but you don't have to pick up after yourself when you're done. Throw in some oversized birds hanging from the ceilings and some pink and teal paint and you've got a pretty good idea. One thing about this place is they get the food up pretty fast, so we can be in at out in a half hour... or less. We looove that.

Well, anyway.. we were eating there over the weekend, as usual. The meal was very good. I got fajitas. They grill a jalapeno and it's one of the best things on the plate.

We got up and headed toward the door, with our usual stop at the soda fountain for the hubs to refill his orange soda. That's when things slowed down a little bit.

Mimi and Pepaw and their little granddaughter... we'll call her Suzie... were getting their drinks.

Oh. My. Word!

First off, you don't give a 3 year old a million choices. You could tell she was clearly having some trouble deciding. But fiiinally, she came up with a choice. Finally, we're getting somewhere.

Oh but wait, Suzie didn't want that after all. So Mimi dumps out the drink (!!!), but not the ice. She rinses the ice! Yes, you heard me.. she rinses it.. she doesn't dump it, because that would be faster and all that, she rinses it. At this point, my little party of three is starting to get a little annoyed at the wait, but we're doing ok.

And then little Suzie gets to make another choice. Fiiiiinally they were both happy with their choice and move on. My husband and I had been waiting patiently for this whole deal to play out and thought we were fiiiiinally moving up in the line.

But nope, we've got to wait on Pepaw now! You would think that with all the waiting and watching he did while his lovely bride of a million years and the little grandbaby chose and re-chose, he would have been choosing his own drink in his head. Like a hundred times over.

But oh-no, that would have been too easy. Now it's his turn and he's got to stand there and figure out what HE wanted to drink. By this time, my husband and I are watching this whole little thing play out in front of us and we're being patient, but golly gee. So every now and then I touch my husband's back, just to let him know I'm here and I know what you're thinking. We were both afraid to look at each other in the eye at that point!

OK.. I know this is chasing a bit of a rabbit here, but to me, this is sort of like in the old days when evvverybody wrote checks at Walmart to pay and the lady stands in line and waits until after HER groceries are completely rung up and bagged to write out the WHOLE check. She could have written it all out except for the amount when she was waiting for the employees to do their jobs and it would have saved the patrons behind her a little time, but that would have been the nice thing to do and of course, too easy. So she waits to the bitter end to do any of it.

This is kind of how I felt about Pepaw at the fountain. He could have thought this whole thing out ahead of time. But he didn't. So we waited and waited. Hurray.. he finally made his move and got his drink.

And then stood in front of the fountain to drank some of it before walking away. My patient hubby got his drink refilled and we got out of there.

But not before giving the Miss America wave to all the people standing in line behind us as we walked away.