Two Projects

First! I spent this past weekend at the Stand Up for Kids National Conference held here in Atlanta this year. I took a couple of photos but I also video’d much of the conference. While it’s going to take some time to edit all of the video, adjusting sound and colors – at least animated photo slide shows are a pretty fast process once you upload all of the photos and press Go. 

I hope they weren’t too weirded out by all of the photos I was taking – since I rarely take posed photos and I don’t have a big camera – so I just look like some weird guy taking a gazillion photos.

Second! – Yesterday I finally made it over to Ann’s Snack Bar with our friends Tulie and Adam.

While I could go to the trouble of writing my own assessment – it’s way easier to simply post what others have already written:

This burger is the burger I have been craving for years and never found—a greasy spoon burger that doesn’t try to be fancy. This was a perfectly seasoned, messy, juicy, cheesy, and mouth-watering hunk of burger. I don’t care that the buns look like they came out of a supermarket—the burger is worth the hype.

– The Blissful Glutton

But the accolade that everyone mentions whenever they speak of Ann’s Snack Bar is from the Wall Street Journal:

…the outstanding hamburger experience I found in an odyssey of several months and thousands of miles was at Ann’s Snack Bar, a justifiably renowned little diner on a broken-down industrial stretch of highway.

Miss Ann, as habitués call her, is a woman of commanding style and ready banter. She works alone at her grill, patting each ample patty lightly as she sets it down. Her masterpiece, the “ghetto burger,” is a two-patty cheeseburger tricked out with bacon that she tends closely in a fryolator.

Observing Miss Ann in action would be enough of a show, one perfected over many decades. But while she demonstrates the extreme economy of motion of a superb short-order cook, she simultaneously carries on a running dialogue of lightly sassy repartee with customers she knows.

So on an apparent random whim, Adam suggested Ann’s and Tulie remembered that I don’t have a job – which means that I’m almost always just sitting at home procrastinating from doing homework. Fortunately we went on a Monday at 1pm – so we didn’t have to wait too long. I finished my ghetto burger but I had to strategically not eat any of my fries to make sure I had room. And while other people have no problem with taking photos while visiting Ann’s – I was worried that my camcorder would be a problem – she looked like she was more irritated than usual and I did not want to get kicked out before I got my burger. 

Several times during our wait at the counter, Adam made sure to let Tulie know that if she got kicked out for her own photographing that she was on her own and he would renounce their friendship right then and there. Here’s the video.

Ann’s Snack Bar from LeahAndMark.com on Vimeo.