Close Encouters Of The Awesomest Kind

I went out this evening to pick up some food for the lovely Mrs. Sneed and me. We have a Mexican fast-service place around the corner, not a Taco Bell type of place, rather something between Taco Bell and a full-service restaurant. The young woman working at the cash register was a kind of disinterested little thing. Most of the workers at the place are recent immigrants from Mexico or Central America. They work hard and are all business when it comes to their jobs. The cashier was an American of Hispanic decent, which meant of course, she had typical American teenager's take-it-or-leave-it attitude about customer service. She also has a bad case of the 'anything else'. Maybe you've observed the anything else syndrome among young cashiers. The ask you if you want anything else after each item you order. They act like their pants are on fire and they need you away from the register asap so that they can run in back and douse themselves with a bucket of water. My purchase came to $14.78 and when I handed her a twenty, she said, "If you have 78 cents, that would be awesome." I guess they were short of change. Alas, I only had seventy-one cents, but luckily, she pronounced it awesome anyway. That's what she said, "that's awesome anyway." Her parting words wished me an...wait for it...awesome evening. And it wasn't just me. While I waited ten minutes for my order, she wished another half dozen customers awesomeness of all sorts. Awesome. Then there's this. It hit one hundred degrees today, here in our fair city. The century mark has arrived more or less on schedule, but its abrupt arrival caught me off guard. Longtime readers will recall that I am not such a fan of the heat. Luckily, the heat is just messing with us, giving us a brief taste of its full fury. It is supposed to be even hotter tomorrow, before dropping into the eighties later in the week. By month's end, the one-hundreds will be on us as a daily happening, at least until the rains start in July. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky