Somehow these leads to pugs and more. They lead to how things are going, Janet says her minddrain is under control thanks to liquid braino (tequila). She wants to know if this is national Tequila year. She wants to be a functional alcoholic when she grows up. They go into talking about smoking too, but they are both ex-smokers.

 Patrick says that Janet will be here all day and she has mad yolks, mad yolks. They laugh and Janet asks him if he knows why she has mad yolks. She says that usually on Sundays she likes doing Sunday brunch, the only thing she hasn’t added is…(it takes her a moment) oh yes, Mimosa’s. Patrick says oh yes, the fake drink, then alcoholic or non? She nearly whines her reply of alcoholic of course. But he says non-alcoholic for the visitors because he doesn’t want to turn them into assholes. Her reply is some of them already are, alcohol might help them. But she doesn’t want anyone to drink and drive. And a phone rings. She then talks about fake Mimosa’s real one’s and orange juice for Kyle.

  But anyway she likes doing brunch on Sunday & what happens is everyone knows that Janet likes to cook. Janet likes family dinners. Therefore, people kinda know they have an open-door policy for family and close friends.

  Patrick interrupts to tell her that she looks fuzzy, so we time out for laughter and camera cleaning. So anyway, she says…she likes to cook and do Sunday dinners. You know when the kitchen door closes, and the pugs are in the kitchen with her and everyone else is outside. She is happy and cooking or baking. As Patrick says, Janet loves to cook, when the door closes, Janet is in her happy place. When Janet is in her happy place Patrick is nowhere to be found. Sometimes even the pugs cannot be there. He kicks them out. If he cannot be there they cannot! She insists that the pugs know their spots.

  Sometimes they have company and Janet enjoys it. Sometimes she cooks brunch, sometimes it is dinner. The other day she did what Patrick and the family called “Mini-Thanksgiving.” She had a shoulder pork roast, a really nice one and as she says, you cannot just open a box of potatoes with meat that nice and call it a meal. You have to actually cook.

  So, they continue and explain that if it is brunch, she usually does like pancakes, eggs, bacon (Patrick throws in, like a nine-course meal), sometimes hashbrowns or waffles. He says if he cannot get everything on one plate it is a mini-Thanksgiving (she interrupts and says he is happy) he says no Janet made too much food.

  She spout off Fine! I am done cooking; he replies fine and of course she again spouts off fine. But follows it up with you’re done eating! He laughs and says no, I am not, no. no. no.

  So what she likes about it and family dinners. He interrupts and says now tell everyone why you like family dinners. She laughs and says that is what I was doing. She continues with what I like about family dinners is, we take our cell phones and take them off the table.

  We usually all have them on a charger somewhere, ringers are off. Patrick says that she told him the reason she wanted to go back to doing family dinners was nobody does them anymore. She replies yes because people don’t communicate. He says that is because they have their face in their cell phones.

  So they agree that people sit in front of the tv with their face in their phone and just chow down without talking to each other. Even at the table. So they have a policy for family dinners and Sunday brunch/dinner. No tv, no radio, no phones. People are forced to talk to each other and communicate.

  She says it is like the scene in the movie the Blind Side. Where Michael Orr goes to their house for Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone is fixing a plate and going to sit in front of the tv. He sits down at the table because he had never had a Thanksgiving dinner like that. The Mother then persuades the family to come sit at the table as a family.

  These leads to the discussion of football, of course. Patrick brings up Janet’s favorite team, Da Bears and what would she do in that situation. Her reply is not cook the dinner to coincide with the game. Besides Thanksgiving is college ball.  She tells him to get off the subject of football. She isn’t watching this year. He spouts off that baby you said that last year. She says it is worse this year.

  She continues with she likes the fact that when dinner (or brunch) is done, the plates get stacked in the middle of the table and everyone sits and talks for half an hour or forty-five minutes or whatever. It is about the communication between the family members. Patrick agrees about the conversing and the laughter and last Sunday they all laughed so hard. He says that they just need to throw in a game of Jenga or something like that.

  Janet says when she grew up it was like that, this brings up coffee. She forgot to make coffee; he wants to fire her but doesn’t. She goes back to when she was growing up, they went to Sunday Mass and after Mass, her Mom and her would do the cooking. Her brothers would have their girlfriends’ over, she didn’t have a boyfriend because she was the youngest. She wasn’t really dating, but at the Sunday table there would be ten to twelve people.

  So after dinner, food would be put away, dishwasher loaded, hand dishes done, table wiped down and dried off. And then the cards came out, they usually played “Shanghai”   it was a fun game, that you need five or more people to play. You also need one more deck of cards than people. So if you have five people, it takes six decks of cards she says.

  Patrick says they played Canasta when they grew up, or pinochle. Janet said they played cards in the afternoon and in the summer went swimming,   Her family spent the day together and that was a good memory, and she would like to bring that memory back.

  Janet says she talks to people, and they say that they miss Sunday dinners and family dinners. But they don’t know why their family doesn’t do them. She always tells them; you are the parent it is up to you to bring it back. Typically they tell her it is too much work. So she says, get your family to help if you don’t like the work.

 Patrick and Kyle both help whenever she needs it. She send out a family text about five minutes before dinner is ready asking for someone to set the table and help dish it up. But if she needs help before that they willingly help her.  So that is what gets her when people complain about not doing family dinner and they are the adult. It is their responsibility.

  She asks Patrick what he liked about family dinners growing up. He said the food, when he was a kid that was it and as a teenager he didn’t care. That brought up the long winding cord and Janet being on the phone in the other room and tying up the phone. Her Dad would just unplug the handset and hang it up. She would be left saying Hello into a disconnected handset. Her Dad would just say, I hung it up for you. Both her and Patrick agree that he had Mad Yolks and Mad Stories. They both miss him very much; Patrick would have loved to have taped him. The secret tapes of Jim McCue Sr. Dad’s Mad Yolks. The stories he would tell. He also would love to tape Janet’s brother David, but that won’t happen either. He is just like their father, he will tell the family stories to you, but you cannot record him.

  Patrick brings up he likes apple cobbler and crumb top apple pie. He likes cherry pie is his favorite and strawberry too. His sister likes cannoli’s which Janet just doesn’t like. They are too sweet for her. Patrick says they are ok. But he like hot apple pie with a scoop of ice cream. Apple pie ala mode. Janet says yes, ice cream in a bowl next too it where it cannot touch.

  He mentions buying a six-section plate and how that would make her happy. They spend time laughing about her using the hors d’oeuvre plate to eat from. Nothing would ever touch, and she would be in heaven.

  They mess around a bit with the mic’s looking like clowns before going back to family dinner discussion.

  They use real plates as Janet says. They go back and forth about using paper plates, and how much paper plates they go through. She totally throws him under the bus once again. Paper plates are for outdoors, camping, etc.

  She then goes in to the discussion of how they destroy the environment using so many paper plates. She has a lot of sandwich plates and plates for every day. Somehow this leads to mad yolks.

  Patrick sent Janet a blonde joke on Facebook, and this brings up how often her brother David used to email her daily with a blonde joke. She says she misses that; however she loves that they talk often, and she gets in-person blonde jokes now.  And Patrick reads his joke! 

  So, Patrick sings, Sunday Dinner…Janet doesn’t know what her favorite dessert is. Usually whatever she bakes is her current favorite. As retired truck drivers, they talk about pie and how every truck stop has lots of pies. So they end up talking about Janet’s Dad and his favorite Village Inn and how they should go have pie there on Wednesday.

  She then goes on how she likes the cooing and the baking more than the eating, even though she has gained a few pounds.

  They then ask everyone to discuss family dinners, and do they have rules? Then Janet talks about how going out to dinner with friends and everyone put their phone in the middle. Everyone had separate checks and if your phone rang and you answered it, you paid for all the meals.

  She says she never had to pay because she always called her Dad right before going out to dinner with her friends and he was the only one she stopped everything for. Patrick says if the phone even rang you should have to pay. Phone should be off. She said the guys paid a lot. She is really good at ignoring the phone. She has visited people and been there half an hour and left because they had their face in their phone the entire phone.

  Get your swag, your covid shots at 18wheeltalk.com/shots get your covid shots with us as Janet is doing a chair dance for you. Not a lap-dance. Someday Patrick will get slapped upside the head from heaven from one of her parents for the things he says.

  Thank you for listening, see you next time!!!