It’s a high of 80 degrees today and my kids want Nancy’s  Italian Ice – blue Italian ice to be exact.

I do too!

If you haven’t been to this great little sweet shop in the Winn Dixie/Sturbridge shopping center on Vaughn Road, you need to go.  Nancy’s passes our test for 3 reasons:

1) It really tastes good (the kids will eat all of it).  The Italian ice comes in fruity flavors, plus, there’s gelato (like a dense ice cream), soft serve ice cream, and baked goods like cookies and cupcakes.  Someone under 6 at our table immediately ate the icing off the cupcake we bought (imagine that) so I didn’t get a lick of icing, but the cake was more like a pound cake than a regular cake = excellent!!  The baked goods are made in the store each morning.

2) It is reasonably priced.   We don’t like taking out a loan to go to the ice cream shop.  At Nancy’s, the kid’s “little owl” cup is $0.99.  The servings are huge. You get a lot of mileage out of a trip with prices like that.

3) It’s a locally owned, family business.  It’s fun to support them.  And from what we gathered on our last trip, a lot of Montgomery families are also having fun supporting them!  The after-school traffic was steady, and it was nice to gather and visit with friends.

Thanks, Nancy’s, for adding some more local flavor to east Montgomery!

If you’d like to find a home near great restaurants and shops like Nancy’s, give us a call.  We can show you any property in the Montgomery Area MLS, and it costs buyers nothing to have a Realtor on your side!

If you live or work in Wetumpka, or are just passing through, you need to know about a great little “meat and three” place that just opened up on 231, close to Riverside Chevy.  The Must Stop Cafe is a winner in my book.

They are having a soft opening so lunch was free when I went by there today. A friend tipped me off, but don’t think the free eats affected my review.

They started us off with “orange rolls” which were basically an orange flavored cinnamon roll type thing. Yum.

They have a daily menu, country style or meat and three style, whichever you prefer. I got the country fried steak, purple hulled peas, and okra. It came with cornbread, they didn’t even ask. I like a place where they assume you want cornbread!

Mine was really good. The steak was not too bready. The peas were fresh and not overcooked. The okra was good, but the real surprise was the mac and cheese. I was expecting the normal runny deal but it was more like grannie’s mac and cheese casserole. It was firm and cheesy, not runny. Excellent.

According to their website, they officially open on March 2, 2010, so maybe the days of free lunch are over. But I can tell you – I will be back!

Today I took my kids to eat at one of our favorite lunch spots: Chappy’s Deli in Peppertree Shopping Center. We had a great lunch and it was fun to be “off” of work. However, I guess I ruined someone else’s fun today, because when I got back to my truck, I found this note tucked under the wiper:

I guess I should be thankful there was no cursing. Actually it was pretty polite (see “please”). It is way too nice to submit to a site like PassiveAggressiveNotes.com.

Here is my parking job, the shadow hurts the shot but you can see the offending entry on the white line:

Here’s a shot from directly in back. Snoopy is right, I broke the barrier:

The irony is not lost on me that normally this time of year, Snoopy’s in a great mood. He’s on TV a lot, doing Christmas specials, etc. But here he is back to his dejected position on the dog house, looking straight up at what the person had to write. Clearly, I have disappointed him.

I would like to say to this person: I was wrong. I did a bad job parking there. Please know I will pay more attention in the future.

Maybe the moral to this story is that Montgomery is such a nice town, even the “nasty” notes people put on your car are pretty polite.

Oh by the way….. Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!!