Lunch at Olive Garden

It is 3:45PM. Nuria and I just returned from a late lunch at Olive Garden. I ate soup and salad. Nuria ate chicken scampi and part of my salad. We both drank tea. The check was $48.24 including gratuity. I remember when you could eat a pretty good dinner for that amount. 

A dollar in year 2000 had the same purchasing power as $1.82 had in August, 2023. To put it another way, your money is worth 55% of what it was worth in January, 2000. I hope you have your money in a high-yield saving account, though the best ones are paying only 5% now (October 2023). That will barely keep up with inflation, although the inflation rate has been coming down in the months since June 2022 when the annual inflation rate peaked at 9.1%. 

But I'm stating what everyone knows and there's nothing to be done about it, so why complain? But it has to be worrisome to retirees who are depending on their savings plus social security to get them through the month. It's a good thing I'm independently wealthy, with millions of dollars in cash and bonds stuffed into my mattress. And Nuria thinks it's just a lumpy mattress that we sleep on.

Correction: Nuria sleeps. I lie in bed awake until I get up and watch some YouTube. Last night I went to bed at 10PM, and I got up at midnight and went to my PC and watched YouTube videos until 2AM, then I returned to bed. I was wide awake so I got back up and returned to bed at 4AM. At that point I was tired enough to finally drift off to sleep. My circadian rhythm is screwed up. I can sleep, just not at night.

If lunch at Olive Garden sounds good, here's what I ate: Soup, Salad, and Breadsticks. The soup was Pasta e Fagioli (there are four kinds of soup you can order) and the salad was the house salad. It is served with garlic breadsticks. All of it was quite delicious! Soup and Salad and Breadsticks is a lunch item and is served until 3PM.

I thought the ice tea was overly strong which gave it a slightly bitter flavor, but the small amount of ice in the glass soon melted and diluted the tea enough to make it okay. It was just tea sweetened with Sweet 'n' Low, so one can say only so much about it.

Nuria's entree was Chicken Scampi. She ate some of my salad which made her full before she had eaten all of her entree. So we brought home the leftover salad and chicken scampi. We'll have those leftovers for dinner tonight. Nuria said there will be enough leftovers for both of us. I asked her, "Uh, have you seen the size of my stomach lately?" There may be enough leftover food for her, but I have my doubts that the leftovers will satisfy both of us.

If I'm writing about my lunch, you know I have nothing to write about. But if I have to write about nothing, at least I try my best to make the "nothing" sound interesting. And with photos.