{"id":2211,"date":"2017-02-07T18:28:55","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T01:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikebellah.com\/wordpress\/?p=2211"},"modified":"2017-02-08T04:39:33","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T11:39:33","slug":"the-lunch-bunch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=2211","title":{"rendered":"The Lunch Bunch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Was home sick Monday (chest cold) so I missed the lunch bunch\u201410 colleagues who have met weekly for nearly 10 years.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re a dissimilar group. There\u2019s the Shakespearian (with a timely quote for any occasion), the rancher\/Karaoke singer, the comedian (who does convincing impersonations of about every administrator AC has had), the grammarian\/sorority girl, the actress\/life-of-the-party, the journalist\/video-maker, the speech teacher who\u2019s always up for a road trip with the prankster, the economist\/philosopher whose understated humor is second only to the comedian, the prankster (if someone released hamsters during the graduation processional, she would be suspect #1) and the blogger (that\u2019d be me. Oops, that would be I\u2014revised with a nod to the grammarian\/sorority girl).<\/p>\n

The lunch bunch has changed over the years. Half have become department chairs (makes it harder to complain about admin), all have moved into that empty nest\/new grandchildren stage of life (which means we have plenty of both joy and sorrow to go around) and four of us have retired. Not a worry. There is no \u201cTil unemployment do us part\u201d clause in the lunch bunch bylaws.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve dined all over Amarillo and Canyon: catfish at Fat Cat\u2019s and Feldman\u2019s, barbeque at Dyer\u2019s and Delvin\u2019s, Italian at Napoli\u2019s and Pescaraz, burgers at Green Chile Willy\u2019s and English Field, comfort food at Calico County and Hoffbrau and Tex-Mex at Leal\u2019s and Tacos Garcia.<\/p>\n

But mostly we talk. And laugh. And, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the laughter of friends has got to be the best sound in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was home sick Monday (chest cold) so I missed the lunch bunch\u201410 colleagues who have met weekly for nearly 10 years. We\u2019re a dissimilar group. There\u2019s the Shakespearian (with a timely quote for any occasion), the rancher\/Karaoke singer, the comedian (who does convincing impersonations of about every administrator AC has had), the grammarian\/sorority girl, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2211"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2213,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211\/revisions\/2213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}