It’s time for The Nest to enrich your life with three tales from my past week in another exciting edition of the Weekend Threesome!  Sundays will never be the same…

We had a storm of mostly rain but some ice and snow come through on Thursday.  I was taking a nap during the latter part of it that evening when the power went off for about 10 seconds.  When the fan goes off, I wake up.  Over the next half hour, it blinked on and off for a few seconds three different times before finally going out for good.  Well, not for good… only an hour.  It’s not like I’m still in the dark now.

Since I can’t sleep without the fan, that made me get up and stare at the darkness for a while…

If you look real close to the left, you can see Ody’s white neck and one of his paws lying on my couch.

The only light in the neighborhood that was on was this one that kept peeking in the window…

Not that it made it any brighter…

According to my calendar, the full moon was Wednesday, but you could have fooled me.  Thursday’s moon looked just as well rounded…

While getting lunch to take to Mom’s Wednesday, I made the surprising discovery that our local Long John Silver’s has closed down.

Sorry Troll, looks like you’re out of work again…

Businesses come and go, but of all the fast food restaurants I remember being in town from my earliest memories of eating out 40 years ago, it had been one of the few survivors… and the only one of those five left that would have still been recognizable to a time traveler from 1982… as it still retained that iconic look of a Long John Silver’s restaurant.

What a Long John’s looked like forty years ago… ours had morphed very little from this design.

The other four holdovers from my youth: McDonald’s, KFC, Jack in the Box (which went through its mid-80’s Monterrey Jack phase) and Burger King all ALSO had iconic unique looks back then that you could easily spot without a sign anywhere in the country…. but not anymore after remodeling into more modern yet sterile structures.  While still in their original locations, their current buildings look nothing like their instantly identifiable 80’s designs.  I never realized until they were gone how much those cookie cutter but unique restaurant layouts were endearing to me.  There’s actually a blog that both honors and pokes fun at the iconic architecture of fast food in the latter half of the 20th century via the silly way it looks when a new business inherits one of these old recognizably designed buildings…

This totally didn’t used to be an IHOP.

One of the hazards of using my Shelf critters so often for features on my blog is the wear and tear it puts on them.  Mitzi’s snow white coat is more a dingy shade of ivory now, Snuggle Bear badly looks like he needs a bath (or a shower with Big Scrat), Sparklepony becomes slightly less sparkly with every appearance, and one of these days I’m going to crack open the back of Hung Lo’s head with the heavy base of Slider’s bobblehead due to their positioning on the shelf.

Alas, there has been a casualty, and naturally….

Now Buster will never be able to see his next impending death coming…

My Buster doll was created exactly eight years ago by YoungAtFifty as the winning entry in my very first Contest of Whatever, and the years have taken their toll on him.  Making Buster’s life especially harsh is that he is constantly being folded in and out depending on whether I need him or Evil Squirrel to appear.  While ES’s black eyes are sewn in, YAF chose to use stick-on googly eyes for Buster, and his left eye has become almost completely detached.  Naturally, I found I have no glue that isn’t dried up beyond use, so I’ll have to remember to get some when I go back to work this week so that I won’t have to make a little pirate patch for him.  I guess if worse comes to worse, I can just nail his eye back into his skull….