FLIP + CHING

Zumba World Party Party

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Ching under Events, Games, Zumba.

What do Zumba instructors do when they get together on a Saturday night? Well, we WORLD PARTY PARTY of course! LOL. Get your own copy of the game here.

P.S. There are a ton of photos so be sure to click on the left and right arrows.

YMCA Annual Campaign

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Ching under Events, Things to Do.

This is the kind of impact your donation dollars make when you support the YMCA Annual Campaign.

Please help me raise money for the YMCA Annual Campaign by completing the donation form below. The dollars go toward helping strengthen our community. Make a difference in someone’s life today!

I’d been wanting to try Metro Grill II since they opened the restaurant but we hadn’t gotten around to it until recently. Brian and I hadn’t been eating out for one and, secondly, when we do eat out we end up using convenience as a key deciding factor. So we end up eating where we work, play, or are going to be rather than going out of our way for a restaurant. Don’t get me wrong. We have done that, but that’s not what usually happens.

Anyway, we fully intended to make something to eat at home yesterday but the stars just lined up for us to try Metro Grill. When we went to see grandma yesterday at Victoria Falls, we drove by the restaurant. It’s located just North of Kellogg in one of the commercial strips along Andover Road. So that’s where they’re located!

At that very moment it seemed as though a lightbulb materialized out of thin air over my head. “Why don’t we just have dinner there tonight?” I asked Brian. “I’d been wanting to try it.”

We arrive a little bit before six o’clock and there were no other customers yet. I think we were their first diners of the evening.

Here are some pictures that I took of their dessert display.

Even though the desserts looked fantastic, I was worried at first. “How good can this place be if there’s no one here at dinner service?” I wondered. However, three people showed up as we were mulling over the menu and other groups of diners trickled in as we were waiting for our food and while we were eating. We were just early I guess, but we are a couple of old farts and we prefer to eat dinner before seven. LOL.

By the time we left they actually had a decent dinner crowd. We didn’t linger. We just stayed long enough to eat our meals and then we bounced because we still had to move furniture around for my World Party Party and then we had to head over to the Candle Club to watch The Fabulous Fleshtones perform.

Here are some pictures of our dinner.

Brian had the Cuban, which he said is good but not as good as other Cuban sandwiches he’s had. He said they use dill pickles instead of sweet pickles, which gives the sandwich a slightly different flavor. Another thing that’s different about the Cuban at Metro Grill is the shoestring potatoes that you see sprinkled on top of the sandwich. Those are also inside.

I had the fontina chicken with mushrooms and asparagus. All of that served on top of white rice. I’m a rice eater (lover?) so that helped me decide what to have for dinner. They have a wide selection of menu items and when I checked FourSquare for recommendations it seemed like everything was good. If it weren’t for rice, I’d probably still be trying to decide what to have. LOL.

The flavors were delicious but the presentation of this dish was a little lacking. Everything seemed like it was just piled on top of one another. The plate they used to serve the dish is also quite small. After the pile of food and the bread on the side there’s barely any room to maneuver. I would recommend serving this dish on a bigger plate. I would probably leave the bread off too because I usually eat bread or I eat rice. It’s either or and not both. For me, anyways. Other people probably feel differently and it’s good to have options, I guess.

I’d been craving fruit salad since I ate the last of what was left of mom’s fruit salad so I ordered their fruit salad for dessert. It was good but it just seemed like a bunch of fruit mixed together. And, again, the presentation was blah. There really isn’t much there. With the beautiful desserts that were on display, I really hoped that this would come out prettier. You can’t even see the coconut shreds, which they put at the bottom of the bowl. I would have sprinkled that on top of the fruit salad.

I’m not sure how much thought went into deciding what fruits to use but, even though it looked like a bunch of fruit mixed together with no rhyme or reason, they were able to create a good cornucopia of flavors in my mouth. I specially liked that it had bits of mango. I mean, who doesn’t like mango?

Despite my critique of the presentation, I did eat every bit of the fruit salad. Brian didn’t want anything to do with it, and I thought it tasted good. I still prefer my mom’s fruit salad though.

The verdict? Metro Grill II is not bad. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve never been. I have mixed feelings about the value, though. I thought my dinner was priced appropriately, but I thought Brian’s sandwich was on the expensive side because it didn’t even come with any kind of side dish. They could have put a few leaves next to it to increase the perceived value. Brian probably wouldn’t have eaten it, but it would have appeared more complete.

The quality of the food you get for the price is decent, but the place isn’t exactly a “cheap” place to eat dinner. It’s kind of in between fast food and nice. So perfect if you want somewhere casual to eat but want something better than fast food.

Oh, and one last thing, though I’m not even sure if it’s worth mentioning because it’s kind of a given for any restaurant with an open kitchen. Don’t be surprised if you smell like your dinner when you leave.

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Gamma, Anyone?

Posted on January 8, 2014 by Ching under Life.

Brian wanted to pose next to this sign and crack a Hulk joke.

I don’t know of any other people who have as much fun visiting hospitals as we do. Seriously. Even my surgery last year was a blast. Well, the parts I was conscious for anyhow. The trip to ER the year before that was pretty fun too actually. If there’s anything that we do well, it’s making the best of things.

I’m so grateful for having a husband who is fun to be around, who doesn’t whine incessantly, and who focuses on the positives in life. It took several years to get you to this point but it took just as long to get the crazy out of me too. I’m thankful that we’ve helped to transform each other to the best versions of ourselves that we can possibly be. I look forward to continuing to get better with you. I love you, baby!

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Grandma’s ER Room Adventure

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Brian under Family, Health.

Shortly after the New Year my Grandmother fell in her apartment. When she called me she said she had fell and broke her wrist. I immediately called 911 and had an ambulance sent to her apartment. When I got there the EMS were already on site and I let them into her place. We stabilized her arm and got her to the emergency room. This is where the fun started.

Normally my parents are the ones who get called, but my dad works for Boeing and he now works in Oklahoma. So this was my first time doing this and I was unprepared. Once we got to the ER they got her in a room and started asking her questions. We went through the normal ones like what how many surgeries have you had, when was the last one and so on. Then they asked her about her medications and after we went through all of those she pointed out that she can’t take a series of pain killers because she has an allergic reaction to them. Then he asked if she drank. She said she likes a glass of wine from time to time. Then he asks if she does any recreational drugs, without missing a beat she said “Yes!” I started to laugh. The nurse looked at her strangely, then she took a moment and processed the question in her head and realized what he really asked.

You see, she thought she heard “Do you recreationally drink?” And she answered accordingly. When she processed the actual question she started back paddling to correct herself. Then we all had a good laugh. It’s good when you can take a moment like a broken wrist and hip and still have a good laugh.