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On a recent trip to Taylorsville, GA… my buddy Brady Stribling and I stopped and a random rural gas station. We stumbled upon this gem of an energy “product”.

Due to recent health issues, I’ve had to eliminate my caffeine (and candy) intake altogether… but Brady had to buy it as a souvenir. The back read “Mix BLOW in 16oz of your favorite beverage and SHARE WITH A FRIEND”. Scary. It also said “DO NOT SNORT BLOW”. Even more frightening was that the crack vial this stuff came in was leaking, and was all over the inside of the blister pack that it came in. QUALITY.

I think there is a direct correlation with “energy” products like this (most energy drinks for that matter), and tobacco usage way back in the day. With no regulation… who knows what the hell is in this shit. For all we know it is REAL cocaine, and not caffeine, taurine, and yellow #5 dried into a crack vial and sold in shady refueling stops.

While on this excursion… I missed out on an amazing candy purchase. It was called “TOXIC WASTE”. The irony is that we were right next to a nuclear power plant. Next time, my friends… next time.

 

BAGS OF CRACK.

I mean… look what was on my desk when I came into work this morning!

 

Candy, Candy, CANDY.

This is my first post over here at liketoeat… but I am a long-time reader, and fan.
😀

My name is Andy.  I pretty much eat… ALL THE TIME.  Which is weird because I am skeletal thin.

This is a picture of what is in my desk at work.

CANDY makes the world go around.  It is the best.  I LOVE IT.  If you ever want to give me candy, I will gladly accept.  Unless you’re in a creepy panel van with FREE CANDY scrawled on the side.  Then maybe not.

I will try to keep you updated on some of my food adventures.
In the mean time… NOM NOM NOM NOM CANDY.

 

Kill Will!

This past weekend, Laura and I took a road trip over to Columbia, South Carolina. This was a bit of a last minute trip that Laura’s good friend Jamie proposed just a few days ago, but it sounded like a great idea so we were down. We got up early on Saturday and started on the trip by heading to Chick-Fil-A where I got 3 biscuits (they were giving away free chicken biscuits with the purchase of a combo for some reason), and then stopped by the Cost Plus World Market for Laura to pick up a bottle of wine for her friend John who was letting us stay on his floor. We’re pretty bad at spotting wines but finally found the desired Chateau Elan muscadine variety that he’s a fan of.

After 3 fun hours of the ultra-scenic highway 20, we made our way into Columbia. We started the trip with a trip to Five Points, a neat part of town made up of lots of restaurants, stores, and bars. Laura suggested a local favorite pizza place called the Village Idiot for lunch, and it was great (and cheap, we both ate for $4…college towns are neat).

The restaurant featured weird mirrors behind the seats which made for fun photos.

We had cheese pizza. It was nice.

After lunching, we made our way over to the USC Campus where Laura spent many years of her life. Jamie and Drew (also alumni of the school) were already there hanging out, so we met them there and they gave me a quick tour of their old school. I was amazed to find that regular colleges feature things such as real restaurants (Chick-Fil-A, Burger King, Starbucks), a Barnes and Noble, movie theaters, and a baber shop inside the campus. Apparently art schools think it’s cool to toss everything inside one 5-story building and give you a snack bar. Awesome.

Here’s Laura posing in front of the super fancy Library on campus. Apparently most of it is underground, I thought that was neat.

Here’s Jamie, Laura, and part of myself in an elevator.

Drew, Jamie, and Laura posing by some sign in one of the buildings.

USC was also really fond of their mascot, and it’s image appeared all over the city. Apparently it’s supposed to be some sort of game cock, but I’m convinced that it looks like a cross between a dragon and a bird, and called it that all weekend. Most people found that strange.

Following the campus tour, we started over towards John’s condo where we’d be staying for the night. We arrived there, hung out for a while, and then headed out to the New Brookland Tavern where we’d be seeing Valencia perform.

We made it to the tavern and headed inside, and at this point I was starting to realize that Columbia seemed to be even warmer than Atlanta. It was easily into the 90’s, and the New Brookland Tavern greeted us with very selective air conditioining that didn’t really do anything, but oh well. On a better note, Valencia played an awesome set, and we all really enjoyed it (except John, he thought it was too loud, but seemed to enjoy himself at the bar the entire time).

Here’s Laura and John hanging out before the show started. John is tall.

iPhones take terrible pictures in dark places.

Valencia during their set. They were really good. According to lastFM, I have 193 listens to them this week alone.

After the show, I went to buy a hoodie and talked with their guitarist, Brendan, for a second. He was cool, and seemed to like my big wolf! shirt that I recently picked up from DesignByHumans.

We finally made it out of the show and went out to find John lying on the hood of his truck. After this, we headed over to some Asian restaurant down the road (I forget it’s name, but it sounded like an Italian name) for dinner round 1 with John and some of his friends. I wasn’t really hungry as our lunch had taken place fairly recently, but I did order a bowl of rice.

We finished up at the unknown Asian place and headed back to Five points to wander around and check out some of the bars. I forget the name of the first place we went, but I tried a bit of some frozen beverage that seemed nice at first but made me feel weird about halfway through. We enjoyed the nice weather and scenery, and just relaxing and talking though.

Here’s a palmetto tree that was next to us at this place. They stopped cannonballs during the Revolutionary War.

Here we are hanging out. I think John may have fallen asleep in his chair at this point.

Following this place, we headed over to some other bar down the road. I kinda wandered in behind everyone else and saw Laura and Jamie going up some stairs, and assumed that they were going up to some kind of neat second floor area. I ended up being wrong, and apparently it was just the bathroom. Jamie and Laura laughed at me for a while, but luckily I kinda needed to go anyhow so it saved me a trip.

We hung out at this place for a while and I threw down on a few cups of water. Jamie ended up having a cigarette which made John really angry, so I took a pic. He gave her this look for quite some time.

Following that bar, we briefly wandered into some other place that wasn’t very fun so we departed and headed for a classy place called Speakeasy. It’s this kinda upscale jazz bar looking place, and I enjoyed it.

Here’s a shot inside of it. You can’t really see much from the photo, but there was a live jazz band playing in the back of the club.

After Speakeasy, we finished off the night by heading to a neat hibachi-style restaurant called Grilled Teriyaki. It offered grilled Asian dishes for minimal prices at late hours, and I was a huge fan. I got a Filet Mignon for $8 at 2am. Awesome.

We finally headed back to John’s and started up our living room floor camp out. It went well until around 8am when I woke up feeling kinda terrible, so I drove to the local Exxon in my pajamas to find some ginger ale and use the bathroom (the one at John’s condo is inside his bedroom, and I didn’t really wanna bust in and wake him up). The ginger ale (along with partially awake Laura’s magical healing powers and some Rolaids) fixed me up nicely, although I woke up a few hours later and had to use the bathroom again really bad. Everyone was still asleep, so this time I just wandered into some woods near the condo and that worked out fine. One of the neighbors may have seen me walking out of the woods but I kinda ignored that fact and went about my business.

Everyone finally got up sometime after 11:00 and we all took turns getting ready. At this point, we finally met John’s cousin/roomate who had been hiding out in his room all weekend. We didn’t really have any strong opinions on him at first, however as we were leaving, John mentioned a very interesting fact to Laura which solved a mystery that came up the night before. Apparently, Will (the cousin/roomate) saw Laura’s Nalgene water bottle on the living room table while we were out at the show the previous night, and decided he’d be super mature and deface it for her (and mind you, this guy was probably in his mid/upper 20’s). She’s had this bottle for a number of years and has decorated it along the way, and one of the more prized items on it was a PETA sticker that is no longer easily found. Now, I like to occasionally poke fun at vegetarians just as much as any American carnivore, but writing “People Eating Tasty Animals” with a sharpie marker on a complete stranger’s belonging is just unnecessary. Once it was discovered that Will was the culprit, Laura decided to start plotting some revenge ideas. The most doable in the immediate future ended up being a movie poster which I helped out with after I got home, and I’m quite proud of it. Here’s the final result:

Laura has full intentions to go through with the title of this, so Will should probably be scared. I’m even planning to loan out my mall-bought samurai sword that I used in a Halloween costume in 2003 to help with the efforts.

Ok, back to the rest of the Columbia trip….We finally left John’s condo Sunday morning and headed over to this place called the Gourmet Shop. Laura and Jamie are completely obsessed with their pimento cheese sandwiches, and seem to have a tradition of going there whenever they are in town. I was pleased at the fact that they had Belgian waffles and croissants, and made those items my breakfast.

Here’s Drew attacking Jamie while we waited for our food.

And then we have evidence that perhaps Laura isn’t a vegetarian after all.

Our food finally made it’s way out and everyone was pleased. Here’s a shot of mine:

Laura and Jamie were excited about their sandwiches.

After brunch, everyone said their goodbyes and we started the trip back home. I had an awesome time overall though, and huge thanks to John, Jamie, Drew, and Laura for making it possible. A few more pics are up here, feel free to check those out as well.

 

Good Thing I Didn’t Die.

….more on that riveting title later. Anyhow, welcome to the first liketoeat post in a while, and I greatly apologize for being somewhat absent on here lately. I’ve been super busy finishing S3 issues, doing freelance work, and a bunch of other stuff, however I’ll try to post a bit more regularly in the future. Also have a few items that happened ages ago that still need to be posted about, so keep a look out for those before too long.

So on to the fun that made up this past Saturday….

A month or so ago, Jerry called me asking if I’d be interested in playing guitar with a friend of his from work, a guy named Richard Harris. Richard is a 21 year old Jamacian that happens to be a huge fan of country music and is a great singer, however he didn’t play any instruments or know anyone that did, hence me getting volunteered. Richard had plans to enter the Colgate Country Showdown and had already written lyircs to a song, so my job was just to come up with a few chords to go along with it and help him make a demo to submit to a radio station in Rome to enter the contest. Jerry and Richard came up to the S3 office a little while back and we were able to accomplish this (if you’re curious, the recording of the song can be heard here).

Around the first week in August, we were notified that we had made the first round cut, and would be able to play with 19 other artists at the local level showdown at the Grand Theater in Cartersville. That contest took place this past Saturday, and ended up being quite the interesting event.

Laura decided to ride up early with me and hang out throughout the day which was nice. QC also had plans to do this, but misunderstood the time I was leaving by a full hour, and ended up driving up on his own a bit later. Along the way, we stopped at Horse Town, one of the most bizarre yet entertaining stores in the world. I wanted to keep an eye out for a new western shirt (I’ve bought 3 in the last couple of weeks and I’m fairly hooked on these things), but had no luck at this particular location. We did however get a bunch of awkward greetings from the employees, and felt generally out of place the entire time. A few minutes in there was good enough, and we departed for the Grand Theater.

We finally arrived a little after 3:00 and quickly saw Richard in his extremely country outfit. We then noticed many more people also sporting some sweet country gear and huge amounts of chewing tobacco, and again started feeling a bit out of place. We entertained ourselves by making fun of some of the other contestants, and awesome things such as home-made shirts with all of the band members’ names listed on the back. Eventually, a short meeting was held giving us the details of the evening and then we conducted our quick sound check.

After this, Laura, QC, Richard, and I rode over to Publix to grab sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t get any shots of us eating those, but here’s everyone after our delicious meal.

After another few hours of waiting and hanging out, it was around the 6:00 mark and Richard and I were able to perform. We were the first group out, and played our song to the overly filled (and by overly filled, I mean about 50 people) theater, and it seemed to be well received. Lots of my friends (Laura, QC, Jerry, Panda, Andy, and BM) and family (my dad, stepmom, sister, and step-aunt) made the trip out to support us which was really cool, and huge thanks to all you peeps for showing up. Other friends did cool things like ignore multiple phone calls and not show up to take photos, but oh well, we’re used to it at this point.

Here’s one of the shots of us during the performance. I kinda look confused as to why I’m on a stage playing country music, which was partially true. We had fun though.

After we played, we were informed that we had to stay in the back stage area for the remainder of the concert which was kinda lame. It was super cold and boring back there, and we could barely hear the other artists playing. I kept myself amused by getting text message updates from Laura and QC the entire time.

After all 20 artists played, we were all brought back on to the stage to be informed who made it to the top 5. Here’s a shot of all the people that performed.

Unfortunately, we weren’t announced as one of the finalists, but oh well. Most judged things are rigged and have poor decision making, although this time I really couldn’t be too upset as we weren’t able to even hear the people that did get picked. Some of them seemed to be pretty good though, so good job to those people.

After finishing up inside, a bunch of us were hanging out by my car in the parking lot while we waited for the show to finally finish up. It finally ended, and my family made it outside to chat with everyone for a sec and say our goodbyes. An elderly woman in a Chevy Impala had different plans for us however, and this is when the real party started for the night.

This woman starts backing up and no one seemed to think anything at first, but then Andy and Jerry started shouting as she was headed right towards our group of people and my car. They increasingly got louder thinking she’s surely stop, but quite the opposite happened. She apparently had the gas and brake pedals mixed up, and continued backing up with a good bit of added speed. The entire process was a big blur, but I remember seeing a number of people go down and being insanely shocked and scared but thinking it was over, but then the car kept coming and slammed into the back of my Fit. Laura was the first person I saw on the ground, but luckily she didn’t seem to be too bad and quickly got up. Andy had us worried as his arms were shaking a good bit, but he was ok for the most part as well. My step-aunt was still on the ground after everyone got up which also looked bad at first, but she also ended up fine. My little sister suffered the worst noticeable injuries and scratched up her chin, arm, and leg pretty bad, but she seemed totally un-phased by the entire ordeal. After cleaning up her cuts, she said “good thing I didn’t die” in a somewhat comical tone, hence the title of this thing. Byron also went down but said he was fine.

The fit had the entire left side of the rear bumper knocked off as well as a bit of a dent in the rear quarter panel, but it quickly occurred to us that it’s placement potentially saved everyone’s lives by actually stopping the Impala, and I’ll take a dented car any day over seriously hurt friends. The next hour or so saw ambulances, fire trucks, and police making their way to the scene (very slowly however), and everyone had to give their reports and what not. My dad snapped a few shots during this process, here are a couple of those:

After everyone was questioned and a ticket was given to the old woman, we decided a bit of late night Waffle House would be a welcome end to the crazy evening. The whole group headed over there where we all enjoyed some tasty 11pm breakfast.

My dad rewarded my little sister with chocolate pie for surviving the hit, and she couldn’t have been happier:

My stepmom also snapped a shot of our group.

Overall, a crazy yet somehow entertaining day, although we all could’ve done without the getting run over by a car part. Super glad everyone made it out ok though.

 

Live from Jason’s Deli!

So this is my first post made live during a meal with my iPhone. Hopefully it works.

Anyhow, Laura and I are at Jasons Deli awaiting our food. So far, my potato has been brought out wrong twice and Laura’s sandwich was also incorrect. More when our food returns.

Ok, we got our food and here’s me testing the photo upload feature.

My potato is huge and Laura’s sandwich is good.

 

word raped.

This post doesn’t have to do with eating. rather, it has to do with possibly throwing up.  During what should have been a casual visit to Wal-Mart, my mommy was word raped. My sister, Heidi, was in dire need of some more pee pads (she can’t control her bladder like I can), so mommy went to get some.  In the pet aisle, there was a scary redneck guy who was just staring at her.  She avoided making eye contact, but then the creepy guy says to her, “I like your pretty outfit, honey.”  Then later, he says, “Are you married?”  After saying no and scrambling off to another area, he keeps on walking with her and asks for her number.  Of course she says no and that she has a boyfriend, but this does not shut the guy up. Oh no.  He then proceeds to say that he had to try, and that it was too bad because he wanted to take her home and make love to her all day long…starting from the soles of her feet all the way up.  He said he would massage her feet, even if they were sweaty.

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

First of all, mommy does not have sweaty feet.

Second of all, who does this?! Who would say such terrible things?!

Boys, please do not ever use these lines.

 

Smoothie Skate ’08

Sometimes my  mommy and her friends like to celebrate what they call “Smoothie Skate ’08.”  This is when they pick up a smoothie from Smoothie King, congregate in my cul-de-sac, skate on their rad skateboards (Spongebob is the character of choice), and just hang out.  Now, what happens when it becomes 2009?  I’m not sure.  Smoothie Skate ’09  just doesn’t sound right.  Here are some suggestions I have for them: Dance in a line in ’09, Drink some Brine ’09, Dig in a Mine ’09, Swinging on a Vine in ’09, Ride a Swine ’09, and Eat some Twine ’09.

Anyways, I tell you all this because I love fruit, so you know I enjoy a yummy smoothie.  My sister Heidi also enjoys a smoothie.  Just the other day, Heidi and I were napping…

When we heard my mommy come through the door and saw that she had a fruitiliscious treat!

Note that the cup says that Chewing is Over-rated.

Heidi disagrees.

 

Starbucks v. Sonic

I have been lucky enough to travel the world over in search of the perfect thirst quencher.  Today, I would like to share with you all two of my recent finds.  The double chocolate chip frappaccino from Starbucks had a nice layer of condensation on the outside of the cup.  As I am allergic to chocolate, I was not allowed to have any of the actual drink.  My parents, however, enjoyed it immensely and give it two enthusiastic thumbs up.

My other find is the strawberry slush from Sonic.  I did get to enjoy some of the slush, and it was completely delish!  Strawberries are  one of my favorite fruits.  I also enjoy apples, oranges, grapefruits, and peaches.  I do not like bananas, though, and will only eat those as a last resort.  I’m just like my mommy – she hates bananas and says they have a terrible texture.  Oddly enough, she does like bananas in her smoothies.

I was also able to enjoy some hot, crunchy-on-the-outside, mushy-on-the-inside tots.  Give me some tots, Napoleon.  Daddy doesn’t share very well, but I managed to get a taste anyhow.  Nobody can resist my big, soulful brown eyes.

That’s all for now.  I’ll leave you with a cute photo of me. Ciao, bella!

 

I don’t like to eat…

I LOVE to eat! and I shall hopefully have more news for you soon. But for now, it’s late and I just wanted to introduce myself to the liketoeat blog.

My name is Chloe, often referred to as ChloeBelle or ChloeBat. My parents are Jerin and they love me so much! I have two wonderful God-parents – Laura and Cody, and I also recently acquired a sister named Heidi. I enjoy a lot of fine dining, and will be keeping you up-to-date on all the yummy cuisine I get to nibble on.