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This past weekend David and I decided to go out for dinner since Lauren and Garth had gone to a beer convention for the night. We decided on Tortilla Flat on the outskirts of Portland. I had never been there, but had heard good things about make-your-own tacos and such. Sadly, my experience did not live up to that hype.

Upon arriving we were greeted by a pregnant waitress passing by telling us that someone would be with us shortly. Then a frumpy young lady came up to us in a couple minutes and unhappily told us to follow her to our table. The decor of the place was atrocious, but I attribute that to the suckiness of the art and culture of Mexico.

We ordered our drinks and were given a bowl of nachos with salsa for dipping. The salsa was very mild—actually, no heat at all. After waiting for a bit, we finally were able to order. Not being familiar with Mexican foods the way I should be, I got the Special Combo Plate that included a guacamole salad, a cheese enchilada, a beef taco, a chicken taco, rice and beans. The guacamole salad should have been my first clue that I wasn’t going to enjoy my meal. The salad arrived and was plopped down in front of me. It consisted of a healthy mound of shredded iceberg lettuce garnished with four wedges of a waxy, flavorless tomato slathered with a generous amount of guacamole and finally topped with a single lemon wedge. Now, a browning mound of flavorless shredded iceberg lettuce isn’t my idea of a salad. And I’m not crazy about guacamole, though I do like it once in a while. So that part of the meal was a bust.

Then the entrées came out. On the plate were food items that would find in the most underprivileged of elementary school cafeterias on Mexican day. The taco shells were crunchy, except for where the greases from the chicken or beef had soaked in. They were both topped with more of the abundant iceberg lettuce and then had waxy shredded cheese on top. The enchilada looked to be a gooey mess as it was smothered in cheese. Sadly, it wasn’t high-quality cheese, thus the cheese was covered with oil and grease where it had started to separate from being melted. This cheese also covered the cow-patty-esque heap of canned, refried bean paste that laid next to the almost crunchy boil-in-bag Mexican rice.

All in all, it was a very poor experience and I would not recommend the restaurant to anyone, unless I had a wish for them to get food poisoning. At the end of the meal, vomiting would have been welcome, but I don’t seem to get sick easily enough.

As David put it, he’s “had fresher, tastier food at Taco Bell in the Maine Mall.”

I love how Serif will lay on top of my chair like a big cat in a tree.

Again, I love my new phone’s camera because I was never able to fully capture Serif’s carnal habits with a camera phone because he’s so dark, and without using a football stadium light, all you saw was a black smudge in the photo.

The camera on my new phone is pretty rad. Check out this close up shot of Lennon while he was enjoying the view from the top of the cat tree. Macro mode rocks!

Each piece of art was made from a single sheet of A4 size paper and some glue. It’s simply amazing what someone can do with one sheet of paper.