goodbye, yellow brick cafe
the flip off, this cough, a bad dream, headache from hell
“You know you can't hold me forever
I didn't sign up with you
I'm not a present for your friends to open
This boy's too young to be singing
The blues…”
— “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Elton John
Goodbye, Yellow Brick
Yellow Brick Cafe closed for good in Oct., after seven years in business.
I missed the announcement entirely, because I stopped going after the first two years. Some of the quality went downhill as the farm-to-table owner (I hear she came from CA) struggled with staffing, limited hours, and consistency.
The hipster cafe welcomed me to downtown Twin Falls in, strangely enough, another October, seven months after the 2020 pandemic. I fell in love and felt secure in moving here because of Yellow Brick Cafe’s date smoothie and Smoked Trout Benedict.
Silly to guarantee something as a forever home based solely on food, but there you go. I’m a foodie through and through.
It’s sad in a vague sort of way to see them go (for personal reasons). But they’ve been making their way out bit by bit after the initial attraction. They changed chefs, they expanded to Easter and Mother’s Day buffets upstairs, they were a part of every major holiday event, including their last Oktoberfest.
But they just couldn’t stick.
Their date smoothies began to taste more and more like sweet mud water; that is, if you could get one. They were often out of their green smoothies. The seasonal dishes — a veggie-loaded somen, something in a pork belly — were just okay, nothing to write L.A. about. Everything was L.A. fancy and L.A. expensive in a meat-and-potatoes farming town.
The math eventually didn’t add up, not for me.
When they were good, they were amazing. When they were mediocre, they were really mediocre. I read somewhere recently that Idaho, Twin especially, has a hard time attracting workers and keeping them. Everyone here wants to stay in their rooms. Can’t say I blame them.
If you’ve ever been to Yellow Brick Cafe, you’ll feel a little sad and wistful too. High ceilings, velour-wood surround, open dining facing an open kitchen, big ambitions and an even bigger love for the land and the sea and all they brought.
It was like a little dream that never got to be real. Much like a lot in my life.
Girls rule on ‘The Flip Off’
HGTV’s newest renovation show premiered last night to rave reviews from long-time fans of both “Flip or Flop” and “Selling Sunset.” Maybe for not always the right reasons, maybe just to see what happened between designer Christina Haack and her third husband, Unbroken Josh Hall.
For the cave-dwelling off-gridders, Haack and her first husband Tarek El Moussa found fame as designing flippers in “Flip or Flop,” April 16, 2013 — until they divorced after a gun incident in 2016 and she went her separate way in several spin-off shows.
She also married twice more, almost back to back, earning a lot of ire from armchair critics, while El Moussa found love, stability, healing, and redemption as a husband and father with “Selling Sunset” star Heather Rae Young, one of the only classy realtors trying not to dish the dirt.
“I hold nothing against Christina. I understand why she did what she did. We had a lot of hard years through my sicknesses and my mental health struggles from the testosterone.” He takes a long pause. “I've never said any of this, ever.” — “Tarek El Moussa Finally Tells His Version of Gun Incident That Ended Marriage to Christina Hall” by Mackenzie Schmidt, Feb. 1, 2024, People
Anyway…the huge selling point of this new show was Haack and Hall splitting almost halfway during the first episode. They weren’t getting along for a lot longer, Hall seemingly more of a drag than a help.
The fallout from that break-up actually aired in an emotionally touching twist that could’ve been a Hallmark movie: Haack asks her ex-husband to come over to tell him that she and Josh split up. They sit down, and Christina just gets so vulnerable and real with Tarek until they’re both crying.
If you’ve watched these two, you know this moment is special. They’re not the crying type. They’re all business, bickering like brother and sister, trying to eke out the most profit from the least likely sources.
Christina does something no ex-wife would ever do: she acknowledges that Tarek has become a better man, husband, father, and flipper, apologizes for doing stupid things since their divorce, and lets him know in the most profound, non-groveling way that she has learned so much from him as a successful flipper to the point where she turned into him during some of the most contentious disagreements with Josh.
This is where Tarek almost breaks down, owning up to his part in the divorce and the pain. Actually shouldering the entire burden, like the best friend and gentleman he really is behind the frenzied amping out and shit-talking about her being “second place.”
Heather wisely steps aside to let the exes work things out, focusing on the renovation and the ROI flip. She could’ve easily slipped into a tiresome role as the new, jealous wife, but if you’ve ever seen “Selling Sunset,” you know that’s not her style.
She and Christina are a lot alike: focused on solutions, pragmatic, calm in a storm, ingeniously creative, flexible, the total opposite of Tarek. I’m not the only one who would watch them in a show of their own. They would kill it.
Who do I think will win? Does it matter? As far as I’m concerned, all three of them won just now.
Probably Christina, though. If she joined forces with Heather, the two would be unstoppable. They kind of are, as fantastic role models for up-and-coming girls wanting to dominate real estate, flips, and design.
Women are just more detail-oriented…
That purple marbled counter and back splash of Christina’s…wow.
WTF’s wrong with me?
A friend of mine asked for prayers for speedy recovery today. She caught some terrible bug last Fri.: fever, congestion, some lung-affected coughing. I could feel the worry and fear in her text. She’s an accountant in the middle of tax season, which goes from the end of the holidays to April. This is the last thing she needs.
Immediately (because I was raised to believe everything’s my fault), my mind went to last Wed., when I handed her a loaf of sourdough bread at her workplace. I’m not “sick,” per se, but I’m not completely out of the woods quite yet.
This damned coughing…
At that time, I thought I was just in the nagging-cough stage of a weird cold I came down with two days after Christmas. I didn’t feel unwell. No congestion, no runny nose, no sick feeling usually associated with colds. Just random hacking up green and thick, bloody-colored phlegm.
At first, I thought it could be my GERD advancing into throat irritation. But my husband, who’d returned from a three-week trip to WA for gigs, seemed to have some of my same symptoms, only milder. (He even went to a clinic for possible Strep — no, all clear — with the nurse practitioner putting him on a round of Prednisone.)
Two days ago, however, I started to feel unwell, like, for real. As in the early stages of a real cold that goes nowhere. It feels like there is a dome sitting over my head, so it might very well be the residual sinus infection doctors told me I would be prone to get (because of the hole in my septum from taking FloVent wrong back in WA). Or bronchitis.
On the advice of my husband, Dr. Weber (only in my mind, heh heh), I am starting to take an asthma inhaler/controller.
Who knows what it could be, with all the novel viruses circulating. There’s a TB outbreak in Kansas, avian flu spreading all over the U.S., and god knows what else leaked out of a military lab … allegedly.
People react differently to different bugs, depending on their DNA, immune system, past infections, diet and lifestyle, age, and maybe who they interact with.
You know how scientific types reported a decade or so that we are attracted by scent to our future partners in the pheromone theory? Something like that. It could explain why I could be around one person who’s sick and be fine, but someone else entirely and be sick as a dog two days-two weeks later. You never know…
‘I can do whatever I want!’
My husband worried so much about my post-nasal drip and snorting up bits of food from my sinuses/throat last night that he elevated our Sleep Number bed on my side a little more.
It was like taking Claritin after not sleeping for a week.
I wanted to, but I couldn’t, no matter how much I tossed and turned and peed and rearranged pillows under and around my legs and hips.
By the early morning, I’d cranked my neck.
After asking Ed to put my side of the bed back down, I finally slept, and dreamed a terrible dream I was stuck in my ex-friends’ house, eating their food, sitting on their couch, and wandering around touching things, like it was my house. I thought it was before it turned into theirs.
All of a sudden, the rest of their family showed up, side-eyeing me with guilt trips and side-spouting Christian platitudes until the matriarch chirped repeatedly, “Why are you still here, then, eating our food, if we’re so terrible?”
Horrified and claustrophobic, I couldn’t get out fast enough. But some of my family were still in there, clueless. I had to go back and scream at my mom in a panic to GET THE FUCK OUT!
“You have one second to get out, or we’re leaving,” I said to a table full of mourners, refusing to look at any of them. Apparently, I had two more children?!
As I stepped out into the sun, I found myself going down the steps of my old high school in Aiea, fending off a young man dressed like a missionary, hammering away with Scripture after Scripture designed to shame me into submission.
Finally, I turned and called out, “I have a right —!” before my tingling left foot and a weird squeaking sound from my C-PAP mask woke me up.
I have a right to stay or go.
It was 1 p.m. — the exact time of my dream son’s therapy appointment. He had planned to bag on school that day and just go to the appointment.
In real life, I cut ties with these people recently.
When I turned on YouTube, there was an old video of the “Breaking Bad” cast reunion and clips from the AMC series.
Walter White. That’s who the guy reminds me of.
No wonder I wanted out.