Somewhere around mid-afternoon yesterday I conceived an intense desire for a good, rare steak. As it was my night to make dinner, this wasn't too difficult to satisfy. So we went to Outback.

Note #1: In the future, even on a Tuesday night, call ahead and find out what the wait is, and get on the call-ahead list if necessary. The place was crammed. They told us it would be nearly an hour before they could seat us. Luckily, it turned out to be only a little more than half an hour. (Outback pretty consistently over-estimates their wait times, I've found. Better safe than sorry.)

Note #2: Dammit, I liked their Key Lime Pie! Why'd they take it off the menu? Excuse me while I go pout and sniffle.

Note #3: You'd think, as long as I've been eating at Outback, and as well as I've got my usual order down pat ("Iced tea, unsweetened; small Victoria filet, rare - yes, I know what rare means here; salad, no cheese, bleu cheese dressing on the side; baked potato, everything except chives.") that I'd eventually remember to add in "no seasoning" for the steak. Outback's steak seasoning is way too spicy for me. Luckily, I caught our waitress after I remembered and she got them to scrape most of it off in the kitchen.

Note #4: I don't care how pregnant you are or how much the baby is squashing your stomach. There's always room for just one more bite of really good steak.

Braz and Kris gave us a video that they'd acquired back when Kris was pregnant. It's a shortish (half-hour or so) presentation video meant to answer common questions that new parents have about caring for themselves and the baby when they first get home from the hospital.

Braz calls it the "Poop Video," and had warned us that they show dirtied diapers right on the screen. He and Kris, unaware of the video's explicitness, had been munching popcorn or something when they watched it. Forewarned, Matt and I did not have munchies when we put the tape in.

It wasn't as bad as Braz made it sound.

Actually, it was that bad, but for different reasons. The acting was horrible. The "story" of the video (because, y'know, the gods forbid they just talk to the camera) is that the hostess is a homecare nurse visiting two of her patients and answering their questions. Which was fine, as far as it went.

But she was obviously looking not at her patients but over their shoulders at the cuecards. She said "health care professional" instead of "doctor." She had a verbal tic that made Matt and I both nuts - after every question, she'd say, "Ah!" An "ah" or two in a conversation isn't so bad, but it didn't need to come with every question.

The "new mothers" were better actors, but they had perfectly immaculate houses, and silent, immobile infants. The first chick was wearing skin-tight jeans and makeup - supposedly only two days after she's left the hospital. The second was more believeably dressed, but they gave her the stupidest questions to ask.

I won't even get into the annoying bits of editing, where instead of filling the screen with both women's faces at once, it flickered back and forth so that only the speaker was visible - even if her line was as short as, "Yes." (Okay, maybe I'll get into it a little bit.)

None of which means that the information in the video was bad. It was, in fact, pretty good. But lordy, couldn't they have hired some college student actors or something? And someone with half a braincell to look over the writing? (Why conveniently tell us that the new baby is sleeping and being watched by the off-screen dad, only to have a dad show up with a wholly unbelievable bundle of blankets that doesn't move with the piped-in "crying-baby" noise?)

Ah, well. I have extracted the useful information from the tape, which is what they gave it to us for.

--Liz