doing lunch

Ed and I have lunch a lot. We have been having lunch a lot for about 18 years. I'm not so positive that it's been so great for our careers, but hey—he's still employed.
We are creatures of habit, Ed and I. We like certain places and certain waitresses, preferably with accents (like Joanie, above, laughing on the left), and certain foods. Over and over again. We do not tire of these choices because if we like something we like it. It also cuts down on the decisionmaking process. With world affairs and heartache to worry about, we do not need to worry about whether we can get a table. We like places where we can always get a table. Mostly that's because the kind of places we like, everybody else is sitting at the bar. Sometimes we sit at the bar, too. And sometimes we invite other people to lunch. But not usually on Monday.
When it's been a hard time, whether at work or at home, Ed usually orders chicken pot pie. I order a steak. Otherwise, he has pastrami, and I have a grilled cheese sandwich. He likes spinach salad, too, and pasta (if we're at an outdoor cafe) and duck l'orange (if we're at the French place). We both like hamburgers, but right now we don't have a place to eat that serves good hamburgers. We both like them very rare.
We drink beer at about the same rate of speed, also, although we mostly do not drink the same kind of beer, unless it is Stella on draft, on which we agree. The rate of speed at which we drink is about two beers/hour. This is not too bad unless the lunch lasts six hours, which it has been known to do.
Sometimes we don't have lunch because Ed is in Afghanistan or Kosovo or Haiti or Iraq or, lately, in that real hellhole, Washington DC. Or I might have been on the road or on the island. Still, I think you could easily average it out to a hundred lunches a year. I don't feel like doing the math on the beer.
Ed, correct me if I'm wrong.