Abandon Nest

They say breakfast is the best meal of the day, and I would tend to agree. Eating breakfast will leave you feeling energized, awake, and alive. You’ll be ready to tackle the challenges of the day more readily. A great day almost always starts with a great breakfast. So what’s the best breakfast foods?

• Cold Cereal - Cheap and easy to make, cereal is preferred by a vast number of people. You’ve got to love a food that takes 15 seconds to prepare and fills you up for half a day. A lot of cereals are heart healthy and will do your body well in the long run. I’m a big fan of Honey Nut Toasted O’s, which is a generic cereal that you can buy at your local grocery store. It comes in a bag, lasts a long time, tastes great, and is good for you. What more could you ask for?
• Instant Oatmeal - Can you go wrong with oatmeal? I don’t think so, especially if you pick up the maple and brown sugar variety. Instant oatmeal is similar to cereal because it is cheap, easy to make, and filling. However, unlike cold cereal, you’ll be grateful on a cold winter day for the warm feeling hot oatmeal gives you.

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If you’re going to go out to eat you want to get good service. Great service just makes for a better dining experience. I am here to tell you the 3 best ways to guarantee better service for you and your party. Let’s get started.

• Smile - This is extremely important. When you first walk into a restaurant, look directly at your hostess and smile. This isn’t some half hearted movement of your lips either. If you’re not flashing a genuine grin at your hostess, this will not work. If you do, you’ll brighten her day and probably get a better table. Once you’re seated and your waiter comes, smile at him too. He’ll like the fact that you’re nice and probably a good tipper and provide you with more prompt refills and other perks.
• Order with class - You have the menu in front of you. Look through it and decide what you want. If you’re getting a cut of meat, think about how you want your meat cooked. Look at the available side dishes and pick which one you want. When your waiter is taking your order, get it all out clearly and succinctly. If you don’t, you’ll cause the waiter to be flustered and they will stop coming to your table so often.
• Become a regular - If there is a restaurant that you frequent often, you’ll get the best treatment if you become a regular. Go there at the same time every week. Order similar things and try to get the same hostess/waiter combination. Tip well and you’ll be well-liked. You’ll get preference over other patrons, the fastest service, and other perks.

If you want really great service, treat your servers like the real people that they are. Talk to them and make sure you appreciate the job they’re doing. Don’t treat them as indentured servants who live only to serve you. Do that, and you might have your food spit on. If you were serving people food for a living, would you rather see a happy smiling patron or scowling impatient one? Think about it next time you go out.

For the last couple of months I’ve been packing my lunch for work almost every single day. I do this for two reasons. First, it is much cheaper to pack then it is to go out to eat every single day. You can save a lot of money by preparing your own food. Second, I don’t want to leave my desk every day at 12:00 to drive somewhere, deal with the stress of other people, and then have to go back to work. Leaving work provides me with a feeling of finality and doing it in the middle of the day thwarts that.

For these reasons, and many more, I’d like to encourage you to pack your lunch. To assist you in this endeavour, I’ve prepared the following list of tips, tricks, and hints that I’ve gathered since I began packing a lunch (way back in 6th grade!)

• Buy a lunch bag - It may seem like an extraneous expense at first, but buying a lunchbag leads to many great things. First, your food will stay colder or warmer longer. Second, you’ll be able to pack silverware without worrying about rips and tears. Finally, the amount of food you can safely bring will increase.
• Pack the night before - If you don’t listen to anything else I say, you must obey this rule. Packing your lunch the night before will exponentially increase the likelihood that you’ll actually eat food from home rather than going out more often than you’d like. The pressures in the morning to hit the snooze alarm and sleep for “5 more minutes” are just too great. More often than not you’ll run out of time and not prepare yourself something.

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