Kevin & Johna .com

Earlier this month I posted an entry about seeing a cup from Raising Cane’s, one of my favorite restaurants from the south, in Plymouth, MN. I quickly learned (like, within an hour from 3 different people — the fastest response to any blog post EVER!) that MN actually has one.

And now, I’ve been there.

Its in Apple Valley, MN. And it was delicious! Since the only time I’ve ever been to one of these places were when my parents lived in Louisiana and now that they live in Texas; going to Cane’s felt like going “home” for some reason. Its odd to think that, since I’ve never called LA or TX home. It just goes to show that “home” is less of a place and more of a feeling.

And it took Cane’s delicious chicken to make me realize that. See… its some powerful stuff!

Disclaimer: the author of this post does not assure you of having a similar enlightening experience by dining at Raising Cane’s.

I’m trying out some new blog themes. So, if you visit over the next week or so and see things looking a bit different - that’s why. We’ll see if any of the designs are still “cool” to me after I try them for 24 hours or if I just go back to the old one.

The one (and possibly only) thing I loved about when my parents lived in Lafayette, LA was a little fast food restaurant called Rasing Cane’s. The food is all chicken related and its all good! The restaurant features posters from classic movies and did I mention the food is oh-so good?!

If you ever get the chance to eat here, I highly recommend it. They have locations mostly in Louisiana and Texas with a few others scattered around the country - none anywhere near Minnesota. However, the other day while I was at lunch (in Plymouth, MN) I got out of my car and saw this:

Now, while Cane’s is very good (and they have some of the best sweet tea you’ll find anywhere) its not really the kind of food you want to haul across country (by car or plane). I can’t help but wonder what the story of this particular cup is; but it got me out to their website to double-check and see if there was a Minnesota location on the roster. There’s not. Yet.

That reminds me … I need to make some plane reservations to go to visit my parents in Texas. And they need to take me to get some delicious chicken at Cane’s when I get there!

Update: I no more than hit “Save” on this post and went to lunch with someone from “Southern MN” (Lakeville) and found out that there is a Cane’s located down there! Cane’s website isn’t the easiest to scroll through, so I missed it. I see that I didn’t even have enough time to get back to the post and update it before someone else brought it to my attention (thanks, Tamer!)

 – Now you know where to find me over lunch tomorrow!

On my last run to Target I spotted a product I didn’t know I couldn’t live without:

All this time I’ve been walking around without having my ears dried by a device like this. And for a cool $59.99, this device can be yours too.

I refuse to be one of those parents that has a kid and then suddenly can’t find anything else to talk about with people. So, with that in mind, let me tell you about my dishwasher.

Wait, don’t leave yet.

We have a dishwasher that has systematically had features stop working over the last few years. The cost to fix it was estimated at $300 on up. So I set out to get a new one, quickly, since doing dishes by hand isn’t on my radar screen at the moment. I checked the usual suspects Lowes, Sears and Home Depot. I found a good deal on one at Home Depot and told the sales woman “wrap it up!”

Nearly TWO HOURS LATER she had finished the entire sale from the time I first walked in and started talking to her to the time I had paperwork and was on my way out the door. It was at that point that I noticed the price was off by $25 because of a sticker they had mistakenly left on the display floor for a promotion that was now over.

After a bit of discussion, she agreed it was fair to give me the extra $25 off but admitted it would be a pain to cancel the order in their computer system. She began to frantically look for a solution to this problem. Her brilliant idea was to hand me a parts kit, worth $20, and have me return it at a later date.

Knowing that my wife and son were at home expecting me to be home nearly 3 hours earlier, I agreed.

However, the whole thing ate away at me. I got poor service, had someone argue with me over the price that was clearly marked on the floor and then spent a good 30 minutes waiting for her to find a way out of having to re-enter something in her computer system.

As a consumer, my only real method of communicating my satisfaction with a company is with my spending dollar. With that in mind, I went back to Home Depot and spent another 30 minutes backing out of the transaction - 29 of those minutes were watching an employee navigate a computer system.

I drove 2 blocks down the street to a mom-n-pop type store and found the same washer for $30 less than the price advertised (which, remember, I never really got) at Home Depot. I also saved $80 on the install and suddenly didn’t need all the permits and tool kits that the Home Depot woman insisted were required.

It reminded me how good some of these stores really are and how much more fun it can be to shop for things at them. I need to make an effort to shop at places like that more often.

It continues to amaze me how popular my Netcot.com site continues to get! Its now being accessed by Google’s news.google.com as a source of news and its been featured in the iTunes music store (under the “Kids & Family” podcast category) for over a year now!

It amazes me that people continue to find the site and podcast. It amazes me that they tell their friends and family. But what really, totally, completely amazes me is when people send me a picture of themselves wearing a “Netcot” t-shirt in the parks or listening to the podcast while in the park (shown - a listener is listening to the podcast on her iPod while infront of the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland).

This kind of stuff inspires me to keep the site and podcast going. I make little-to-no money off of it and it requires a lot of time to write, record and produce. But its pictures like this that keep me going with the whole thing.

If you stopped by our blog in the last 2 weeks, you might have noticed some funky things (like the word “array” appearing all over the place or worse, no blog at all).

Longstoryshort: we moved to a new ISP after I (Kevin) screwed up the blog and got extremely poor assistance from the former ISP company.

That was just the last straw I needed to finally make the jump to the same provider I use for my professional blog site. The move is complete and everything is back to normal.

Now … on to our regularly scheduled blogging…

We’ve finally posted some of the 500+ pictures (don’t worry, not all of them) from our trip to Disney World with Johna’s parents.

You can find them here.