// August 4th, 2003 // No Comments » // Personal
Although I must have walked past it a thousand times, I’d never eaten at TJ’s. It’s one of several small joints along High Street here in the Short North where I reside. Earlier last Saturday morning, I was driving with my brother Jim, and we saw Patrick and Joey outside the Coffee Table (the central nexus of the Short North). They were going to TJ’s for breakfast and Jim and I joined them.
I wish I could say the food was good, but it was really kind of bland. Which is too bad, because they have a dozen or so specialty omelets that you’d think would really kick butt…
We told Patrick about the fitness expo that I was dragging Jim to. A friend on mine (Kelly) runs a gym, and his partner Mindy was working the expo as an EAS rep. She told me the day before that there would be plenty of free stuff, and that’s all you really have to say to Patrick: “consumables + free” and he’s all over it like white trash on Velveeta.
It was a decent outside event, with plenty of free samples, like a weird Halloween for fitness people. We said our greets to Kelly and Mindy and loaded up on freebies. We were also given invitations to a private party down at Fabric. All in all, we each made a good haul before we left.
Patrick didn’t feel like climbing the rock wall at Galyan’s, so we dropped him off and headed up to Easton to climb. I love climbing shoes, despite that they’re a bit like an exercise in Chinese foot binding. Jim said I scaled the wall like a spider. I got some good routing to the advice from my belayer, so it wasn’t as rough on my forearms as it could have been. But a couple times I was forced to dive for a handhold when one was out of reach… that’s a great experience to have when you’re 50 feet off the ground. The last ten feet had me jumping into a position with an overhang, hence no footholds, and by that time my forearms were just toasted, so I couldn’t hang on, and fell off the wall. A good run, and enough to make me feel sufficiently manly to continue living the urban lifestyle.
After sundown, we met back up to do the Gallery Hop, which is a monthly event down here in the Short North, wherein all the artists open their shops, and all the suburbians flock in to buy strange things with beads glued on them (as “art” so often is these days). It’s a great place to meet people, and not all of the art is bad.
Around 10:00, Jim and I headed to Fabric for the party, and it was CRAZY. Dancing-on-the-bar crazy. I spotted Mindy and talked to her a while but I didn’t really feel the vibe, so we left pretty early, heading over to a jazz club back in the neighborhood. Some soul/funk/R&B/Disco (?!) band was playing, and they were very good at getting the crowd into their music. More things transpired, but maybe that’s a story for another time.
