Today after work, it was blazing hot! We didn’t feel like cooking, so we wanted to go out for dinner. Not only that, we wanted to take the kids someplace special and we chose Spirit Halloween store. My son watches youtube videos about the animatronic monsters quite often but when we got to the store, he encountered a new one that he hadn’t seen a video about and got scared. He wouldn’t even come in the store, until Abby convinced him to walk passed the display. The temperature in the store was hotter than outside and outside was 99 degrees. We all were sweating and getting cranky, so we got a quick look throughout the store and then took off.

The mall has a new food spot called Blondies. We stopped and ate our dinner there, the spot Blondies took over was the old Arby’s restaurant, they kept all the same seating just gave the whole place a fresh coat of black paint with Yellow accents to the walls and spray painted all the table tops to give it a sort of 70’s rock theme to it, maybe its tied into the 70’s band with the same title.

I ordered what any grown ass little boy would order someplace new. Chicken tenders with bbq sauce, fries and a drink. The drink was Pepsi, served in a small, what seemed to be 12oz cup. No refills though. The kids weren’t hungry so it was just Abby and I that ate. She ordered a buffalo chicken wrap with fries. She commented on how good the fries were, as for the wrap, she called it the worlds smallest wrap. I gobbled down my chicken fingers, each one burning the roof of my mouth a little more each bite. My nose was running and my eyes were watering from the hot tenders. They weren’t spicy just regular tenders, but they were fresh out of the fryer. Whenever I encounter hot foods, I tend to just eat it faster to get rid of it. Rarely do I savor the flavor of anything, so thats exactly what I did with the tenders. Ate them in record breaking time and ended up with 3rd degree burns in my mouth. Its all good, because after that we ended up getting some lemonade from Annie Ann’s.

The mall also has a pretty impressive arcade that occupies 2 locations in the mall. The games are both vintage and up to date. Most of the games spit out tickets where then you can redeem them across the hall and a nice, pretty attendant is happy to help you figure out what to choose. I took a $20 out of the ATM and at the token machine, there was a bonus of 100 tokens for $20, so naturally I slid the Jackson into the machine and it spit out 100 tokens.

My daughter thought that was impressive. I divided the tokens into two dixie cups and handed her, her own cup. She went off to play some games. I followed my son and fed whatever games he wanted to play the right amount of tokens and he had a blast. Literally, there was one game that had a toilet connected to it and you could basically pee on these targets as they light up. He didn’t really grasp the concept, but you best believe I sprayed the shit out of those targets when it was my turn. I played some of the games and found myself gravitating toward the more casino games. I racked up a little over 100 tickets and had my kids split them. They enjoyed feeding the ticket box some of the tickets, my daughter was a little apprehensive as she thought her finger would get stuck, but then she got the hang of it. At the counter each kid ended up with 60 tickets. They both chose candy, Tootsie pop, blow pop and double bubble gum.

This was a nice way to spend time with the family, I’m glad we decided to go out tonight. I think I’ll end the night with some HBO Max.