210sanantonio.com

Store sales were relatively quiet on Black Friday.  San Antonio’s best sales were at Wal-Mart, BestBuy, and Office Depot.  Deals were on laptops, clothes, plasma tvs, and home appliances.  San Antonians were clearly concerned with keeping their purchases below budgeted spending.  Most only came to stores for specific sales and left without any additional purchases that stores were hoping for.  Christmas shopping will be closely monitored to see how far sales drop during lower economic swings.

There aren’t too many actual blogs out there for the general San Antonio population.  Some journals are rock, others are personal, but this San Antonio Blog attempts to capture various parting shots for the Alamo City.  The design could use some work, but the content is fresh and updated continually.  Blog entries include restaurant reviews, commentary on local services and stores, and advice on more how to questions.  The writing is akin to the old write-in Express-News columns where you could submit your opinions and see if they were posted in the public arena.

Have you been charged with a DWI or other misdemeanor or felony?  Are you looking for an experienced attorney to represent you against the charges you are faced with?  If you have been charged with a crime, or simply want to have your criminal records expunged or sealed,  San Antonio Criminal Lawyer Carl Lobitz is a Texas board certified defense attorney with over 20 years of experience in the criminal law profession.  Carl is a former prosecutor and has handled 1000s of criminal cases.  You can reach him at his office phone or if you are in need of immediate help, you can contact him 24 hours a day.

How do you log on to the web?  If you’re not connected yet, you might want to start thinking about getting into the San Antonio Internet scene.  People are paying their bills, saving gas, saving paper, making money and all that.  It almost makes economic sense to buy at least an internet package of some kind.  You can save a little bit of money if you also have cable buy combining the two.  If you also have a land line, just get the triple combo package.  You’ll get a land line phone, cable, and the Internet at a discounted monthly deal for buying all three.  You can visit San Antonio isps to read more information on saving money and what you can do with the Internet.  I personally have a 1.5 mbps line and it’s still pretty fast at downloading youtube videos.  If you want to download movies straight to your pc, I’d go with a little faster line as you might have to do some stopping and waiting.

I think this may become a popular segment for me.  I’ve been to a few San Antonio  restaurants over the last month so let me share some of the good and the bad moments.

Farmosa Gardens - (however you spell it) Get this straight.  They want you in and they want you out.  Went on a Sunday afternoon and this place is high volume.  Waitress takes your order and the bus boys and managers fill your water and deliver the food.  The waitress was rude but the manager and bus boys were nice.  I asked the waitress to put my friend on my bill before the ticket was out and she told me that it was too late and I had already had my chance.  Well if she had said anything about the tickets being all individual, I didn’t hear it.  But even if she did say something, is the ticket etched in stone?  Besides that rude experience, the food was moderate.  (They don’t offer brown rice if you’re healthy minded) Prices were good, but wasn’t worth the bitchiness.  Grade: C

Hungry Horse: Underrated healthy, semi country place.  Good vegetables and entrees with reasonable prices.  Fast cook time.  No complaints.  I’ll be coming back.  Grade: B+

Mamacitas: First few times I came here, I loved it.  Then, the service went way down and the food seemed southward too.  Always pretty good hot sauce, but this place has trailed off after starting out on fire in my book.  I must say I’ve had the same waitress the last two times and she seems very aloof and unconcerned.  The managerial staff seems less concerned about maintaining an impeccable restaurant now.  It’s a shame, there was real potential here.  I doubt I’m going back.  It was so good at first I convinced myself multiple times, the next would be different and it hasn’t been. Grade: C+

Order Up:  This goes for the I-10 and Wurzbach location.  Burger was ok for a cheap backyard bar-b-que.  Fries were horrible.  Chips were so greasy they could have slid out of my hand.  No waitresses but the girls that take and deliver the orders were confused and out of sync.  Our order took longer than expected so they offered us chips and salsa.  I appreciated that but then the chips looked lethal.  You only get one heart right?  Maybe two, but I didn’t want to take my chances with those cholesterol mungers.  My friend had the pizza and I had a taste and we both agreed the middle was uncooked-doughish.  My friend says the other location is much better so we’ll see about that.  Grade: C-

That’s all for this edition.  If you have any of your own, please email me [contact AT 210sanantonio DOT com] or comment in this blog.

Later.

I went to La Cantera the other day.  As you would expect, there’s tons of fancy stores but I wouldn’t recommend it as a place to shop.  The prices are inflated sky high which really deters the average shopper from extensive buying so all most will be doing is walking around looking.

The crowds are entertaining though.  There’s a lot of hot air going around and it’s not just because the mall is outdoors.  The fact that you can find $1000 clothing puffs up the superficial people walking around and makes them think they are Hollywood.  You can usually spot them a mile away wearing oversized, unnecessarily dark sunglasses and walking around noticably trying to be too good for everything.  The reality is they just drove 20 miles to come to La Cantera and spent their last two weeks pay check on the clothes they’re wearing.

The Apple store looked cool but the crowds negated any browsing I might have done beyond the first computer monitor.  The Sony store had really nice TVs.

Overall, I went to La Cantera and walked around.  It was crowded and I couldn’t really look at anything unfettered so I left the stores I was in.  Even if it wasn’t busy, it wasn’t like I was going to be spending 135% on any regular item (say for example shoes) and neither I nor the person I was with would have been buying anything extraordinary (like a brand name purse or electronic) for $400+.  Basically, I looked around and saw some upscale stores and then went home after an hour.

I’m sure this is everywhere - or maybe I’m not - but have you ever seen how people will just sprawl out and BN or Borders?

I go to look at a computer book one day and there’s this student just laying out in front of the book stacks.  Did I miss something or did San Antonians just liberalize book store etiquette?

To me if you want to sit on the floor because there’s no chairs around - fine.  But that’s it.  No extended speaker phone conversations and no taking up more than 10 square feet of the floor.