Gratitude Monday: dining out

As I write this post, I’ve got a fan going at the wind tunnel setting in my living room, with four holes in my walls.

This is because last Thursday I was working from home and realized my bare feet were wet. Water was seeping up through the floor throughout an area about 4’x10’ along the wall I share with my neighbor’s dining room. I called the condo management association and spent the day waiting for their plumber to come out. He cut three of the holes, in an attempt to find the source of the flood, before he went next door and discovered that my neighbor’s ice maker was leaking, and her floor was flooded, too.

Well, he fixed the ice maker, but as it wasn’t clear whether that was the cause of my disaster (it might have been the torrential rains we’ve been having), the condo association sent a contractor out on Friday, who cut a hole in the wall approximately where the refrigerator is on the other side. The short version of this story is that both the plumber and the contractor believe the ice maker is the source of the water, and therefore the water damage. But just to be sure, I have to live with four holes in my living room walls, with buckled floor boards, rugs rolled up in another room and a fan going to try to dry things out. The thinking is, if there are no more leaks, then it was the ice maker, and I’ll have to put in a claim with my neighbor’s insurance to rip up and replace the floor (and remediate any mold underneath it), patch and paint my walls, and whatever.

All this when I don’t even know for sure that I’ll have a job next week.

But even so—I have reason to be thankful. Because Friday night a tiny (26 seats) restaurant in Lexington, Virginia (home to the Virginia Military Institute, but also to Washington and Lee University) asked a party of eight, which included Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to leave. The owner had polled her staff—some of whom are LBGTQ—and when they said they did not want to have to serve that lying, bigoted, arrogant, soulless mouthpiece for the Kleptocrat, the owner asked Sanders to leave.

Which she did, although she used her official press secretary Twitter account to whine about it the next day, lying once again about how she’s always polite and treats people respectfully—as though her pressers aren’t recorded for all to see her at her reprehensible worst come day, go day, week after week.

(It was a bad restaurant week for foot soldiers in Cadet Bone Spurs’ army: chief Nazi Stephen Miller and Aryan DHS Rottenführer Kirstjen Nielsen were both shouted out of DC restaurants by protesters. Mexican restaurants. They were eating in upscale Mexican restaurants after orchestrating the policy of imprisoning asylum seekers at the Mexican border. Talk about yer cojones grandes.)

Leaving aside the protestors yelling “Shame! Shame!” (which is absolutely their right, although pretty painful for other patrons in the cavernous space where Nielsen was videoed), I’m a little uncomfortable that restaurants can start denying service to people based on their lying scumbaggery when they are not otherwise disrupting the place of business. Being a fascist mouthpiece is not a protected class, like race, ethnicity, religion, gender identification or sexual orientation, though. And I admit that it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that these despicable humanoids are tasting some of the rotten fruit they’re so happy to dish out to others.

But the Red Hen restaurant is now facing not unexpected backlash from the MAGAts, including death threats that forced them to close on Saturday. Losing a Saturday night’s revenue is tough for a business that runs on such tight margins. The Deplorables have also invaded the restaurant’s Yelp, Google Reviews and Facebook pages, leaving badly spelled one-star reviews. It’s possible that the restaurant will be closed for a while, which could be disastrous for owners and staff. “For a while” could well become “permanently”.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: following the example of someone on Twitter, I ordered a Red Hen gift card, and asked that it be sent to Project Horizon, a Lexington-based organization that helps victims of domestic violence. 

Looking at their menu, $40 is not going to go far, but it’s about five days' worth of meals from downtown DC food trucks. (I don’t buy my lunches at work precisely because of the expense, but I reckon that one week’s potential lunches is a fair amount to contribute.) I do not know that I’ll have a job after this week, but I’ve got one now, and I can use some of my income to help the principled folks at the Red Hen and give someone from Project Horizon a treat.

That balances out the holes, the fan and the mold.