I was going to hit the gym tonight after the conference let out, but the European contingent showed some cohesiveness by ditching the guy from London. Well, he’s a guy from Hong Kong originally but he’s still a Euro to me. In any case, he was stuck by himself so I had to tear myself away from the chick flick I was watching to go out to dinner with him. We ended up wandering around downtown Lexington which does double duty as a ghost town on Tuesday evenings.

My usual metric for finding a restaurant is to find something that has regional food and that isn’t empty. Unfortunately, the most people I saw in a restaurant was six, and that was the place I insulted two of the wait staff who were having a smoke behind the place. I asked if the place could be any good with so few people in it and when I realized what I had done I told the Londoner that I didn’t want spit in my food so we kept moving.

I finally stopped a couple of people and asked where they would eat and we went to what I would call a dive. There was a woman close to my age with a kid who looked like he was in his early 20’s. The animated conversation was not one that relatives have; it seemed more like a date. It didn’t spoil my dinner of fried green tomatoes and a pork chop with apple sauce (the apples were from the cook’s back yard).

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to the gym. The Gold’s down the street is only open until 9PM!