This birthday boy (57 on the 16th) strapped on the ol' feedbag yet another time as we went out to the Golden Griddle weekend bunch buffet for $9.99 Canadian (oink oink!). (D'oh! I just noticed on their website that we could have saved 10 per cent for being "Seinors," i.e., 55 or older. I'm going to have to make sure I'm cashing in on all such goodies from now on in.)

Anyhow, the experience was basically a good one although, as can happen so often, there was an individual (a young woman, in this case) facing me whose buzzsaw-like voice I found irritating. Her voice was high and grating and she liked to talk. A lot. (I would liken the experience to that of listening to the sound of a fly buzzing on a window pane, very close by.)

Be that as it may, we dined and we drank coffee and we went back for refills on all those off-limits items we generally avoid. However, unlike in former times, I did not wreck havoc on the establishment's foodstuffs, decimating supplies, causing management to have to rush out to secure more. That, actually, is one of the things that tends to happens to you when you pass 55: although one can be a pig, one tends not to be a pig on quite the same scale as in earlier times. Savvy restauranteurs, recognizing this quality therefore offer senior's discounts and the like, knowing full well we won't be making a serious dent in their overhead, try as we will.

If I really had wished to be crass and to "get my money's worth," as it were, I suppose I could have returned again and again, filling plate after plate, and then left them all, untouched, on adjoining tables and chairs and so forth. But that's not my style.