Back from Idaho

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
- Jack Kerouac

Last week, Aunt Shelly wrote me an email and told me that she wouldn’t have a clue what was going on in my life if I didn’t get my haircut so often. Clever line. She has the writing gene as well. From what I understand, Grandpa McGill was a fine writer, expressing his thoughts mostly to family and friends through letters. Sometimes I wonder what he would have written via email if he were alive today.

This past week I was up in Idaho on business. As a younger man I spent some time working in a similar community in California. Going in there, I thought I was going to take a business trip to Mayberry—a place where people are nice, want to you to sit down for “a spell” and shoot the breeze, and invite you to their home for dinner. That town was the complete opposite of what I was expecting. So going to Idaho, I was a little concerned about how things would go over, and what type of people I would be meeting.

My concerns about the people of Idaho were completely without merit. Everyone I met up there couldn’t have been nicer. I wasn’t invited into anyone’s home for dinner, but I did have lunch with a different people within the organization every day. People shared stories over lunch about their family, favorite activities, and their hopes for the future. It wasn’t quite Mayberry, but it was close.

Like any community, there are quirks that aren’t visible immediately. Usually when people first meet, there are a few questions that people will ask each other to sort of feel each other out. A few examples are: “Where are you from originally,” “Where did you go to school,” etc. Up in Idaho, they would go through these questions as a primary sequence, but after these had been answered there was a secondary set of questions that went in this order: “Do you have any kids,” which is then followed immediately by “Are you married?”

I’m not quite sure about this—given the state of things in current society—but I was always raised to believe that you get married, then have children. It would make sense to me that the sequence of questions would be opposite in order than they were up in scenic Idaho. Then again, maybe I just give off a, “I am a man-whore” vibe.

One of the other things that I noticed about Idaho is a focus on the quantity of food that a restaurants serves seems to take priority over the quality of the food that a restaurant serves. On several different occasions people said, “They give you a lot of food their” about each restaurant we went to for lunch. Each place did give you a lot of food, it wasn’t always up to par on my scale. Now maybe I have been jaded by watching too much Top Chef—and becoming accustomed to using the phrase “flavor combination” in a sentence—but I don’t think that a reheated hamburger patty with two Kraft singles on top, doesn’t make a great cheeseburger. It may be a lot of food, but it was barely edible on most occasions.

After asking around, I did find a couple good places. During that process I had some odd experiences. While getting lost in the historic district, I stumbled upon a Chinese restaurant, and ordered beef with broccoli. Now I’ve eaten a lot of beef and broccoli, but this didn’t taste like beef. I don’t want to fall back on stereotypes, but I am almost wondering if this was dog. I stomached the entrée, but probably won’t be going back there any time soon.

On another occasion, I went to a local burger stand as I was told they had something called “Taco Spaghetti” which was supposed to be amazing. So, I ordered the Taco Spaghetti, which was pretty good, but they covered it with cheddar cheese. As one of the judges from Top Chef might say, it was a questionable flavor combination.

As Idaho isn’t exactly a hot-bed for night life, my evenings weren’t exactly wild. My night usually consisted of going to the local gym, getting on the rowing machine for 30 minutes, finding food for the evening, then going back to my hotel room where I would pour myself a Scotch whiskey and shine my shoes. It might sound odd, but it passed the time.

Memorial Day is tomorrow and I have the day off of work. I spent most of yesterday running errands: dropping off and later picking up dry cleaning, depositing a tax refund at the bank, buying some new plates and bowls for the house, cleaning out the car and, lastly, doing laundry. It was a good day and I got most of my obligatory chores out of the way.

As I said, I got some money back from the US Treasury in the form of a tax return. Now the question becomes, what do I do with it? I think part of my formal training in accounting is that I’m always trying to figure out how to use my money for the highest and best use. That might not always be the case from a rational perspective though. Sometimes the highest and best use means a new bottle of Scotch whiskey for the collection. Sometimes it means funding my Roth IRA or paying off credit balances. Regardless, I am almost always playing a game in my mind, trying figure out what to do with excess cash, instead of just letting it sit in a saving account. We’ll see what I end up doing.