The "Royale With Cheese" Debacle

This isn't so much a debacle as it is a "How could they get that wrong?!" moment. Wendy's mom visited this past weekend, since she had a conference this week in Milwaukee. On Saturday night, she and Wendy were playing Trivial Pursuit, when Wendy was asked the following question:

What McDonald's item is known as Le Royale in France?

Any self-respecting movie aficionado knows the answer to this instantly. Wendy and I both knew it, and she correctly replied, "The Quarter Pounder."

But no! It's the Big Mac, says Trivial Pursuit. We were shocked. There's a famous scene in Pulp Fiction that goes something like this:

Vincent: "You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?"
Jules: "They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
Vincent: "No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the @#$! a Quarter Pounder is."
Jules: "What'd they call it?"
Vincent: "Royale with Cheese."
Jules: "Royale with Cheese. What'd they call a Big Mac?"
Vincent: "Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac."

At first I thought that the movie might actually have been wrong, but after a bit of googling, I was reassured: Trivial Pursuit was wrong. The answer is in fact the Quarter Pounder. Despite the temporary setback, Wendy went on to claim victory in the game.

We managed to get a fair amount accomplished over the weekend. We replaced a bunch of old light switches and outlets, installed a new thermostat, and bought a new light fixture for the dining room. And we're currently plotting a painting project for this weekend (when Wendy's mom returns, post-conference), although we're not sure yet what we'll paint or what color. Minor details, though.

And finally, the bathroom remodeling that we mentioned in our last post is going to happen on Monday! We're very excited, since it means we'll each now have our own bathroom!

China: Unpacked

Our dining room furniture was delivered a few weeks ago, and last weekend we finally got around to unpacking our china and putting it in our new china cabinet. This is china we were given for our wedding almost five years ago - most of which had never been out of its original box and most of which has moved with us four times in those five years. Impressively enough, nothing was broken, which I think is more a testament to the wonderful things packaging engineers can do with cardboard these days than to the care of our various moving companies.

So we got it all unwrapped and stacked up, and we discovered we had 10 tea cups, 10 dinner plates, 10 salad plates...and 8 saucers and 6 bread plates. "Do you think this is some kind of practical joke that we're just now getting, five years later?" Randy asked. Hee. Luckily, the next day I found one more small box of china that had 2 saucers and 4 bread plates in it. We're all good now. (The dining room furniture, by the way, looks fantastic. It's like we have a real house, with real furniture, now!)

In other news on the home front: We have finally found someone to re-do the shower in the master bath. It looks like the previous owners put up a surround on their own, and it...really looks like it. So much so that we've actually never used that shower - the big, gaping seams in the surround always seemed like something you would definitely not want to get water near. The rest of the bathroom is great - it looks like they recently replaced the toilets and vanities in all the bathrooms, so it will be nice to finally have an attractive, and usable, shower to go with. The only sad part will be waiting the four-six weeks they estimate it will take until they have our custom-formed replacement surround ready to go. We'll keep you updated!