Side Dishes 4-16 (Patreon)

Today's been kind of headache-inducing. As I worked on this page I spent a good chunk of the morning talking to customer service for my internet provider through my Twitter account. Not  my ideal form of communication with a service I'm paying money for, but their website is such a mess that their customer service online chat function wouldn't work at all for me. Either way, they sort of fixed the specific problems I was facing earlier today, but my internet with them is still pretty terrible, so I'm going to have to bite the bullet and change ISPs sometime soon.

Later my wife had the idea to head to our downtown area to try out our new phones by playing Pokemon Go. There's a pretty dense collection of Pokestops in that area, and if we just felt like circling the downtown plaza we could have just run into a bunch of them and gotten a bunch of in-game items. Since we were downtown we decided to check out a barbecue/microbrew place that opened recently and had ton of good Yelp reviews and... well, I guess for some people it would be great, but it's pretty much the worst place possible for someone like me. The place was crazy crowded, and everyone inside was really loud. Two things that I always hate dealing with are crowds, and unnecessarily loud people. The place was probably pretty good as a microbrewery... I was driving, so I didn't try anything. But the barbecue was pretty bad... it was served cafeteria style, but the prices definitely weren't. The cheapest thing I could find on the menu was a pulled pork sandwich for $10. My wife ordered a spicy sausage platter for $12 (which seemed to be just a store-bought sausage sliced in half), and when I went in to order my sandwich they told me they were out of everything except, conveniently enough, the sausage... even though I saw some beef brisket drying out under a heat lamp.  I didn't want to buy anything from them at this point, so I just declined getting anything... my wife, though, didn't want to deal with the hassle of canceling her order, so she just finished, and at checkout they automatically added gratuity (for food I saw them literally spoon out of an aluminum container into a styrofoam container), so she ended up paying $15 for a sausage we could have bought at walmart for about a dollar, some crusty mac and cheese, and room temperature, mostly dry cole slaw.

It turns out the place gives a free domestic beer to anyone who gives the place a Yelp review.

That pretty much put the rest of our downtown trip into a sour place, and I just waited until we got home to have some leftover chicken... which I ended up eating cold, because our microwave shorted out and now I have to get a replacement.

I hate to take days off on the weekend, but I'm considering it for tomorrow. My parents need help moving furniture, plus I need to replace my microwave and find a new internet provider. Would anyone be too bothered if I did? I know that some people are only pledging to the patreon for Side Dishes, and I feel like I probably could get a page done tomorrow, I just don't want to have a headache like this two days in a row.