Day 5: We were in horrible pain all over our bodies except apparently we missed a spot. Don’t worry. We took care of it through biking 25 miles. We toured the San Francisco Bay. We crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge, where I almost killed, or shoved over the side, many pedestrians. Side note: bikes and pedestrians in a small confined space all moving in alternating directions is a recipe for disaster! As soon as we got off of the bridge the chain on my bike somehow fell off:-/ Luckily I had the mechanically inclined and mega talented Sarah Pelham with me. We took winding roads down into the beautiful town of Sausalito, (almost got hit by a few cars.) Had lunch and enjoyed a glass of wine at the most beautiful restaurant with an amazing view of San Francisco on the other side of the Bay. We shopped and then went back to find our bikes… that bike parking area was here somewhere… and did I mention that the 1,000 or so bikes inhabiting the area were all exactly the same:-/? After finally locating our bikes, we jumped on a ferry. We had left at noon and it was now nearing 8:00pm. Bikes needed to be returned by 9:00. While on the ferry we got to see Alcatraz. Very creepy place. We decided before returning our bikes we needed to stop down at our new favorite hangout Pier 39. The ferry was going to drop us off at Pier 1:-(. This was where we discovered our new painful location. Our rear ends were horribly bruised:-( Our friend Cathy was going to meet us at Pier 39 for one last get together so we needed to move quickly across town. We made it there at 8:45pm. The bike place was still pretty far away so Sarah called to let them know we would be late. They were ok with that and told us where their super creepy garage was and gave us the codes to open up the 2 sets of double doors. So now we had all the time in the world:-) except for returning our bikes, checking into our new hotel, packing for the plane, getting a shuttle to the airport and making our 6:00am flight:-/ At this point we needed to do everything we hadn’t done on the pier which was have ice cream and then go get donuts. I had ice cream first, then we went and I kid you not, bought a bucket of donuts. Don’t judge us. They were hot and freshly made:-) We then realized at about 9:15pm that we hadn’t actually had dinner so we had tomato soup in a bread bowl. While each individual item was quite tasty, together they were a train wreck!:-p We sadly said goodbye to Cathy and set off to find the creepy garage. We may or may not have wandered into a deserted alley or 2 but eventually/accidentally found our way there. A piece of traveling advice, the scary homeless people are very good at directions:-) We entered the 2 sets of double doors and returned our bikes. Very freaky. Then we set off to find our hotel. It was on that one street… Oh we will find it. After touring the city we found our hotel. This is when things went downhill. We checked in, retrieved our luggage from the holding room, and then asked the very nice, and apparently very stupid, desk clerk if she would please reserve a shuttle for us in at this point, 5 hours. She asked for our boarding passes, wrote down all of our flight information, and then called the shuttle company. We were all set. We had a wake up call for 3:30am, a shuttle pick up at 4:00am, and a flight at 6:00am. The airport was only 15 minutes away the clerk said because it was so early we would make record time. We were so smart and prepared!:-) We packed, and went to bed around 12:30am.
Day #6 We got up with the wake up call and everything went as planned. Our 97:-/ year old shuttle driver picked us up a few minutes early so we were super on top of things… He topped out at about 25 miles an hour and had to pick people up from 4 other locations. By the time we got to the last pick up it was 4:50am! I said, How far is the airport from here?” He said, “16 miles.” :-/ Then I said, “How long does it take you to get there?” He said, “6-12 minutes.” ????? I looked at Sarah because I thought perhaps my math skills were a little off due to fatigue but unless this man was driving a rocket ship, I had no idea how he would make it in that amount of time. He finally, slowly pulled into the WRONG airport!!! I pointed this out a little loudly and he said, “Ma’am our company doesn’t go to that airport. Let me drop these people off and we will sort this out. You apparently told them the wrong airport.” I said in a frantic, rather loud voice, “We didn’t tell anyone anything they took the information off of our boarding passes. How do we get there, a taxi? Will you take us?” “No ma’am, a taxi would cost you over $100 and I’m not allowed to take you. You just need to calm down and I will make a call and figure out what happened.” In my head, “I want to punch your teeth down your throat and rip out your tongue!” Out loud, nothing. Sarah and I grabbed our luggage and started to run towards taxis. He yelled to us to take the subway. It would be faster. Me in my head, “I would love to drag you behind a pick up truck over shards of glass!” Out loud, nothing. We were semi incoherent when we approached the taxi. We cried and babbled and the man took our luggage and then I felt like we were in a high speed chase on an episode of Cops! I loved that man. We made it to the airport at 5:43. The ride to the airport officially costed us $156:-( This includes stupid shuttle man. The Spirit airlines counter begrudgingly took our luggage and told us to run! We, by we I mean Sarah, ran as fast as we could. Only to be halted at a very long security line. We could hear our flight announcing final boarding calls. Our tears meant nothing to these angry travelers. We finally made it through, ran to our gate and were told we missed our plane by exactly 3 minutes. But don’t worry they could get us on a flight on Monday…2 days later!!!! Break down time. This was not a good time to be completely exhausted and irrational. There were several other mishaps, I left a piece of luggage when we ran through security that happened to be filled with liquids… Oops! I was supposed to check that bag. We had to be physically escorted by a security guard who carried my duffle bag as if my shampoo and hair gel would detonate at any moment. He wanted to throw them away. I did quite a bit of begging and whining to prevent that. That would have pushed me over the edge! To make a really long story still long but not ridiculously so, a very good friend of mine hooked us up with a different airlines and let us use whatever miles he had left. We were set to leave at 4:05pm. This made for an extremely long day in the airport! When we finally boarded our plane. I took the traditional 2 Xanax and immediately fell asleep. We arrived in Phoenix an hour and a half later, still pretty drugged up, we found our gate where we boarded our connecting flight right away. We decided to forgo another dose of Xanax due to the fact that we were still pretty foggy and we couldn’t figure out the time change:-/ Then the pilot announced that we had to return to the gate due to a malfunction of ¥#€£….. He said the latter part in a whispery mumbled tone so I had no idea what he said. Apparently mechanics were going to work on the plane. The pilot seemed to think that it was a computer glitch and rebooting them made everything all better. I took 2 more Xanax and don’t remember what happened next. I’m pretty sure I overdosed a little:-/ when we got to the car at 3:50am, I couldn’t drive because I was literally seeing double! Sarah had to drive and she had to stop a few times because she was so sick. We were a mess! Sooooo glad to be home! Great trip though!!!:-)
San Francisco trip
Continuing on from my last posting, on day #3 of our Yosemite trip but
#4 of our actual trip, we had made it back to San Francisco around 10:30pm after a 5 hour drive with our group. We honestly loved our group and that along with the accomplishment of climbing a mountain made this one of the most incredible experiences of a lifetime! I can not walk down stairs, sit on a toilet, get out of bed, or a chair without screaming a little but so happy that we went on our adventure! We had 11 people including ourselves on this trip. Sarah, Angela, and I were the only people from the US. We had: Paul from England, Marc and Megan from Ireland, Cathy from china, Kirsten from Scotland, Erkin from Russia, Katia and Jonas from Germany. These people were amazing!! My favorite line of the trip was when we finally got to the end of the 8 1/2 mile hike down the mountain and Erkin and Angela were still waiting for us. We thanked them for waiting and Erkin’s response was, “You never leave your comrade’s behind!” I love them:-)
We got off of our bus and we had quite a bit of stuff in the cooler but our guide said, it’s all packed in on the bottom of the gear if anyone wants their stuff. This was the back of a trailer that we had pulled. None of us had the strength to pull or move anything! So he got to keep everyone’s stuff:-( Man I dislike him intensely! After hugging everyone in the group we headed off to our hotel that we remembered was within a couple block radius of the drop off point, in some direction, on some street…What was the name of our hotel again? We were so slap happy at this point and causing a little concern to the rest of our group but we smiled cheerily and said, “We’ve got this! No worries!” And we continued to circle the 2 block diameter of the hotel for about an hour. We finally went into a Hilton and tried to describe our hotel to the front desk man. Mind you at this point we were completely covered in dirt. We were sunburnt, our clothes were stained and we were acting drunk. I pretty sure we were scaring the homeless people. After a little bit of time the front desk man figured out what our hotel was and explained how to get there. We had passed by it a couple of times:-/ When we checked in we were heavily inspected and found to be lacking in the eyes of the front desk man of our hotel. We didn’t have the claim check for the luggage we had stowed there and tried to explain what it looked like and finally he walked away while I was searching and talking and he brought our luggage out. We realized we had never booked a hotel for the next day because we thought it would be fun to be adventurous and try a different location the next night… We reserved a room for another night at this hotel. Got to our room and took the best shower of my life!!! Our ankles were so caked with dirt that they were stained and required a second showering the next day. We washed our shoes and still haven’t determined whether we will throw them away or not. Slept like rocks!
Day #5 – So much pain! We asked our concierge for the best route and took a very sketchy bus to the opposite side of the city to go to the science and nature museum/aquarium. On our walk to the bus, we realized that we were in a semi questionable neighborhood. Once we were on we bus we totally realized that together we were horrible at listening to directions and had no idea when we needed to get off:-/ Luckily our stop was the last one and the bus driver made us get off:-) The museum was amazing and invoked many amazing discussions! We somehow managed to figure out all by ourselves how to get back to our bus but were still a little unclear as to where we get off. We only missed our stop by a few stops! Bonus, a shopping mall:-) Did I mention that it is winter-like weather in San Francisco? We needed coats:-( We made it back to our hotel in time to change for our dinner reservations! We deserved a little pampering! We took a taxi down to Pier 39. Most terrifying ride of my life! This man needs to be in NYC! We walked around the pier and shopped and even had a water massage. Best thing ever except when it hit my calves and my bruises I cried out every time! Time to take our boat out to the world’s only floating island restaurant, Forbes Island Restaurant. There is an actual lighthouse and the entire restaurant is under water! So amazing! We had champagne and wonderful food. We decided to head back to our hotel and were told to jump on the F line. Ok, they have busses, rail cars, subways, and trolleys. So confusing! We were crammed into a sardine can on a rail car in dresses and heels. We had to constantly apologize for falling into everyone around us but they were entertained by our bizarre conversation and Sarah’s singing and dancing in her little space. We were still apparently slap happy! We realized we couldn’t see out cause it was so packed and we couldn’t understand anything the driver said because he mumbled so when he said something that we thought we had heard before, we got off:-( No where near our hotel and still a sketchy area. We kind of knew the general direction so decided to just walk and figure it out. I’m going to blame altitude sickness and dehydration still. After a man raced by us on a bike, threw it down onto the ground in front of us and ran off we started to become a little nervous. We eventually made it back after about an hour walk. We collapsed in bed and had a great night’s sleep!
Day #6 – Today we are going to spend time on the Pier, bike across the Golden Gate Bridge, tour Sausalito, and hopefully fit in a ghost tour in Chinatown!:-) Oh God! We don’t have a hotel for tonight and need to check out in 2 hours:-/ Have to find us a hotel! Goodbye for now!
Yosemite National Park- Conquered
Finally back from the wilderness! Yosemite park was absolutely beautiful although at this point right now I hate it more than anything I’ve ever hated before! Ok so when we originally looked up this tour company we were told we would be provided with a tent, camping gear, a guide, food and glorious vistas to explore! I need to go back to their website because I clearly remember something about at your own pace, and no physical limitations being listed..or age!
Day #1 – we meet our amazing group at 8:00am and our guide from hell! We spend our day traveling to Yosemite and getting acquainted. By the time we had arrived we had invited everyone to my house for a reunion and had also invited ourselves to their homes:-) it’s ok they loved us!:-) We along with one other person in our group were the only ones from the US. There were 11 of us not counting our “guide.” We had a picnic lunch at a beautiful waterfall and Sarah Pelham and a few others from our group jumped off a 30/40ish foot cliff (according to our wonderful “guide.”) I of course documented.:-) We wandered through a section of Yosemite where there were gigantic sequoia trees! We made it to camp and set up our tents. We got our used sleeping bags..:-/ and our mats to put underneath them because we were sleeping on hard packed dirt and rocks. The mats were paper thin and completely useless. We went to dinner and then sat around the fire and made s’mores, drank wine and beer and talked. Amazing time! Oh and our “guide” who has appeared to be annoyed by our presence up to this point left us to go get hammered at a nearby bar…
Day #2 Worst night of sleep ever but so pumped to get into the park. Ok at this point you have to remember we all really thought we were being taken into the park to the valley and given free time to explore with our guide pointing out places of interest and explaining geological features. Nope…! His explanation was there’s a sign talking about geological stuff over there if you want to read it! And then he headed toward a path and said, “Oh today’s hike will be a little more intense than yesterday’s when we wandered around looking at trees! This will be an 8 mile hike.” And he walked off. I truly mean walked off. We lost sight of him after about 10 minutes into the hike. We caught up about 2 miles into the semi vertical hike at a beautiful lake. He seemed a little annoyed at the group’s tardiness. At this point he said, “Ok from here it gets a little more intense. So you can hike the full trail or stay here at the lake and relax and wander around. We should be back here in about 6 hours. If you do choose to take the rest of the hike there are no real trail markers there are just rock piles to let you know you are on the trail”…. Me, “So what you’re saying is, we look for rock piles among the rocks so we don’t get lost???” Him, “Yes!” 🙁 ok so we head out with the group with our 1 little measly bottle of water and trudge on. Did I mention our little bout of altitude sickness? The little “hike” became a completely vertical climb at the end with points of standing on a 6″ ledge clinging to the side of a sheer rock cliff wall with our fingernails! I swear to you I am not exaggerating at this point! Oh and we lost sight of him and eventually our group within the first 15 minutes of the hike! I may have taken one or two breaks:-/ God love Sarah for keeping me going because I’m pretty sure I have never complained and whined as much as I did this day! We were out of water and we were lost several times while attempting to locate our “Rock Piles!” Towards the end of the climb I finally told Sarah to go on with out me..yes in a dramatic voice… Because I wanted to make sure she got to make it to the top of the mountain and didn’t miss out because of me. At this point we were about a half mile away from the base of the sheer rock wall that encompassed the final leg of this torturous journey. It had been nothing but a 45 degree angle on unsteady rock up to this point for about the last 2 miles. I was done! After arguing for quite a bit of time I finally convinced her because we could see the end and we could see what we hoped was the rest of the group. I was afraid the group would be coming down before we got up. I told her I would keep coming but she needed to go. She unhappily went on without me. I got lonely after 2 minutes of sitting and took off. I could see her climb the beginning of the rock wall and then lost sight of her but I was pretty sure I could see people at the top of the mountain so I kept going. I got about 25 feet from the top and everyone was yelling encouraging comments to keep me going. Our guide decided it was a good thing to yell, “Be careful right there it is a sheer drop off!” I at this point looked down and realized I was standing on a ledge that was about 6″ wide and clinging to a rock wall with my fingernails. For those of you that don’t know me I am terrified of heights! I was so exhausted and driven, that up to this point the danger of what I was doing was not uppermost in my mind. But as our “guide,” so eloquently put it I could die with the tiniest misstep. I froze and panicked and later found out Sarah basically told him he was an idiot and reminded him of the hour long conversation we had about my fear on the way there. He kind of laughed and said, “Oh god that’s right!” It took me a little while to unfreeze and finally move on and I actually made it to the top to the cheers of the group! I have never felt so accomplished in my entire life!!! Our “guide” told us that not only did we do it in record time but that he has never had an entire group make it to the top!!! One of our fellow hikers shared his water with us in preparation for our trip down. I just climbed to the peek of an 11,000 foot mountain! I laid on the rock for a while, and then started to panic about having to get down. The group headed out and we quickly fell behind. I fell several times and almost died many times as well. The “guide,” was the first one there and the first one back not caring whether we made it or not. But we just climbed a mountain!!!! Exhausted, dirty and in horrible pain we get back to the campsite and go over to the ice cold river and jump in. Then we went to the motel next door and jumped in their hot tub. Spent the evening relaxing around the campfire. Went to bed early but couldn’t fall asleep because of a couple of frisky campers!
Day #3 – In pain from our previous day and a night of no sleep and rocks, we began to pack our camp up. Sarah took our sleeping bags and useless paper thin mats over to the “guide,” where he proceeded to tell her to make sure we deflated our mats… Ok we can probably take the blame for that although all the other campers didn’t realize that our mats were inflatable either:-( We get everything packed and load the van. We head to the park and unload. “He,” informs us that we are going to be hiking an 8.5 mile trail on our own today and that he will pick us up on the opposite end of the park! What??!! He is supposed to be our “Guide,” as in one who guides… He briefly explained the 5 different connecting trails that we were supposed to follow and we all immediately set off in the opposite direction. He yelled at us to turn around so we did and headed out. This was not going to end well… He had told us that it won’t be bad because it was almost all down except for about a half mile stretch that would be a very steep incline up and that we had 4 hours to complete the trail:-/ Ok we would complete the trail when we got to the end… It’s not like an appointment that we could show up on time for. We promptly finished the trail in 6 1/2 hours:-( It wasn’t just us either. Everyone was late and we were only behind the last group by about 10 minutes. This time we had learned our lesson and took 2 bottles of water:-) those ran out about 1/3 of the way into the hike. It was about 90 degrees and 85% of the trail was in direct sun. Needless to say we became extremely dehydrated half way through the hike. I actually was sweating and covered in goose bumps and chills at the same time. Our muscles were cramping up and we were shaking. I was crying at one point and Sarah was close to tears quite a bit at the end. We eventually took a half empty water bottle from complete strangers! We must have looked pretty bad:-/ I have never been that thirsty in my entire life! We still had a few miles to go before we could get to water. When we did, we drank so much we were sick. We each had about 3-4 water bottles full. Only about a mile and a half till the end. When he said there was an incline he failed to mention how incredibly steep it was. I fell so many times we lost count! We had moments of hysteria where we couldn’t stop laughing and then moments of anger where we plotted “His,” death. I had never felt worse in my life.
Date Night #10 – July
The theme for this month was Glamping! For this date night I wanted my husband to feel the peace and tranquility that camping can give you and the enjoyment of discovering nature and animals. All of my favorite things:-) We went to the Wilds in Cumberland Ohio. It is the largest Conservation Facility in all of North America. It has been in operation since 1989 and it is in Ohio. Who knew? Absolutely beautiful and completely undiscovered. This was an amazing trip and just getting to spend time alone with no distractions other than the belching sounds of the deer below us… and enjoying a bottle of wine while watching the sunset was just too amazing for words. We stayed in a Yurt. We went on 2 tours. One was a bus that we had to look through the windows because of a storm moving in…more about that later…and the other was a behind the scenes tour in an off-roading truck that took us right into the middle of herds of rhinoceros’, zebras, you name it. We were able to feed and pet the ones that wouldn’t bite us. Spectacular time. Many of the pictures show animals right up by a fence or a cage. This was not their enclosure but the place where they came to be fed and it was feeding time while we were there so they were all ready. The storm that I mentioned earlier hit us right when we were in the very middle of the facility. Did I mention that it is 10,000 square acres? They were announcing over the intercom on our bus to take cover…Our bus driver laughed and said well that’s kind of hard when there’s no where to take cover. So we continued with our tour:-/ You can see some little tendrils sprouting out of the dark clouds during this portion of the trip. I thought we were going to die…Oh and we were the only ones on the bus with the tour guide:-) Very bizarre. Then the other interesting moment was when we were in bed and I noticed a tick burrowed into my knee…Good times!:-) I love nature!
Monthly Challenge
At the beginning of each month I want to challenge myself with a different goal. I will journal my progress through photographs. My first challenge will begin on September 1st due to a crazy Summer. Stay tuned:-)
Is Your Marriage Happy? What Are You Waiting For? Make It Happy!
After 25 years of marriage, I thought we had pretty much weathered everything life had to throw at us. We had been a relatively-semi-for-the-most-part-happy family. We are extremely involved in our 3 children’s lives and both of us are very career oriented. My husband with owning and running our 4 restaurants and myself as a teacher. We are both intelligent and for the most part insightful.
Things were running as smooth as bubble wrap when, the disaster happened!! Our children all grew up and moved out. I dont think we had any idea that the children were the glue that held our family together. They were the centers of our universe and our common ground. We had no one that needed our daily guidance, discipline and support. What the hell do we do now? Who was this stranger in my house and bed?
No matter how perfect you think your marriage is, I am here to tell you, this will take major adjustment. This coming from someone’s whose marriage was no where near perfect, but this will rock anyone’s world.
My husband and I started off on a bad path by getting married because “we had to.” or at least that was what was expected back then. Especially for a good Catholic boy such as my husband. The first year was a little rocky but then we settled in for the long haul of complacent mediocrity. Neither my husband nor I took our vows lightly. It was not the ideal marriage but we somehow seemed to make it work. We both have a love for travel and that seemed to carry us along. We had children who were very involved in music and sports that required our mutual presence on a continuous basis. So, we settled into a routine of comfort with occasional ups and downs, not unlike many other marriages. We basically learned to love and tolerate each other but Im not sure that we ever learned to truly like each other. We had complete polar opposite interests except for travel and our children. Our children were a daily activity but travel was only when we could afford and set aside time for it. Still we pressed on.
The trouble began when our children slowly started to go off to college. I had major issues with this because these children had always been the center of my world! I had always felt that being a mother was the most important role I would ever have on this earth and I took this very seriously. This was my first mistake. I had always claimed that my marriage came first. I truly feel that it did, but somehow the children would sneak in and steal that title away. As my children slowly started to move away, little pieces of me were torn off and packed in their boxes. I lived for their visits and slowly withdrew even farther away into myself. My expectations for my husband moving into their place didn’t quite work the way I had anticipated. Our differences became more and more apparent and began to drive a wedge between us. We were complete strangers sharing a home.
I withdrew into myself and he turned to his friends. He felt isolated and so did I. I have issues with confrontation and therefore took the passive/aggressive approach with a heavy emphasis on the passive. I assumed he knew when and why I was upset and that he didn’t love me enough to change all of the things he was doing wrong. He assumed I was a cold hearted bitch who was in a perpetually sour/ uncommunicative mood and therefore avoided our home at all cost. When it became apparent that we were heading towards cataclysmic disaster, we turned to a counselor.
This is an experience that takes me far out of my comfort zone. I feel/felt shaky and nauseous before every appointment. I DO NOT LIKE TO CONFRONT ANYONE OR ANYTHING!!! And our deviously sadistic counselor, takes pleasure in putting me in the spotlight on every visit. So apparently communication is important..who knew? So slowly in each session she attempts to draw out of me, 25 years worth of un-phrased anger, disappointment and hurt.
I went through many stages of feelings about our counselor. My expectations of how she should run the meetings apparently weren’t in her “psychology” books! We were there because my husband has been screwing up for years and I needed her to let him know, make him stop, and then fix him. Makes sense to me….. But she has this bizarre way of twisting and turning everything around so I can’t even tell who is winning. She obviously has no idea what she’s doing. He’s clearly wrong and she wants to know what “I,” could have done to change things in the times where “He,” does something wrong….REALLY??!!
Then I start to think….wait a minute….maybe she is playing a role, therefore disguising her quiet brilliance. By always turning everything around, she fools him into believing he’s not the bad guy, thus keeping him coming to the meetings and slowly using her ninja ways to fix him!
Then finally reality sets in and I realize that she has actually been using her ninja moves on me. No matter what the circumstances, it’s always up to each individual to decide how to react in any given situation. If you are in a bad relationship, either do something to change it’s direction or get out. If you choose to stay, its not the other person at fault, because you have chosen to allow yourself to be treated in an intolerable manner. You will be treated the way you allow yourself to be treated. We each make our own destiny. The only aspect in a relationship that you have control over is yourself! We can choose to quietly stew about something and telepathically convey our message to the offender (my personal method of choice) or we can confront the situation head on and stop a pebble from becoming Mount Everest over time. (This comes from personal experience. I have a mountain range that would make the Rocky’s weep with envy.)
Well done ninja warrior, well done.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking all the blame. I have major issues but, we both pretty much stink at this marriage thing all by ourselves. He has major issues too…I just can’t list them because he may read this. I am just trying to figure out how to get our counselor to move in to our house with us. With her guidance we actually have “meaningful conversations”. We only have them at her office every other week with her prodding and poking, but I have hope and faith that one day we will be able to actually have a full blown uncomfortable discussion all by ourselves. The thing that helps and is key, is the fact that we are both fully dedicated to making this work. After all was said and done, we realized that we really have grown to love and care for each other. But most importantly, we really like each other too… for the most part, most of the time.
We are now currently learning how to administer CPR to our marriage. This has not been a fast road to recovery either. We have had some major code blue moments. We have really had to work hard to find common interests. We discovered that when both of us are taken out of our comfort zone in a situation we lean heavily upon one another. This has forced us to become extremely creative and try things we never imagined.
I can’t honestly say for certain what the road ahead may look like. But I do know one thing for certain, we will walk down that path hand in hand pushing, shoving, tripping, laughing, and crying but we will still be holding on when we reach the end.
Date Night #8 and 9 – June
The themes for this Date Night were; Room Service and Champagne, and Chocolat! I need to explain why we have a 2 for one deal. The main things that my husband and I are working on is his ability to set time aside, and my ability to speak up when I’m bothered by something. So, having said that, I was annoyed by having to ask constantly for his available nights and gave up. I punished myself in the process. So we went a few months without any Date Nights. I finally in my very passive agressive manner, 3 months later pointed the situation out to him. He realized that he was getting caught up in his work and needed to make time for us. He really needs to work on his telepathy skills…. So we sat down and he gave me a ton of dates for the summer. We are back on track and moving forward. OK, so this Date Night was wonderful. It was very relaxing and a nice get-away just as it was planned to be. I reserved a beautiful, 2 story loft suite with a private pool and started off the evening with a romantic candle lit dinner and a nice bottle of red wine in the suite. We went swimming, spent time in the private sauna and later shared various cheeses and champagne. After time in a gigantic bubble bath we had chocolate fondue with a variety of foods for dipping. We watched the movie Chocolat and fell asleep. This all sounds wonderful, relaxing and romantic except for the fact that I left the part out about our bodies being covered by bruises the next day… So, they have a sign up next to the pool that states, “Caution, steps are very slippery!” The sign should have said “Caution, Death is Probable!” After watching Ed almost kill himself while his feet were completely swept out underneath him and he came crashing down onto the steps, and the pole, and then plunging face first into the pool, you think I would have learned…. Well if you believe that, you don’t know me very well. I, knowing that I may not be the most graceful person on this planet proceeded very cautiously to the handrails and had a very firm grip and daintily, seductively, tried to make my way into the pool while keeping an air of romance about myself. Well, that was all before my feet flew out from underneath my body, my knees smacked me in the face, I wrapped myself violently around the pole and then plunged headfirst into the pool pretty much the same way Ed did. Romantic mood broken! You would think that we would have learned from this…. No Ed got out again at some point and entered the pool in a similar fashion as before. I was pretty terrified just to get out! I have bruises on my thigh, shoulder and arm that are the exact shape and dimension of the pole. Moral of the Story… Romance is a Violent Contact Sport!
Date Night #7-May
The theme for this month was a Progressive Dinner in a Limo. Being a teacher, I had access to an awesome set of dice that I could write on with a dry-erase marker. I wrote down 6 different restaurants on each side of the dice, all of different food genres. A roll of the dice would decide the evening’s chain of events. Ed was told to be home by 6:00 and that our ride would arrive at 6:30. He truly thought that I was just going to have a friend drive us around…He should know me better than that by now.:-) Our limo arrived promptly at 6:30 and had to wait a few minutes while I tried to convince my husband we needed to leave. He was on the phone with work and really thought a friend of ours would be walking in any minute to take us on our Date Night. He truly was shocked when we walked out and there was a stretch limo in our driveway. One of the issues we have had with these dates has been time. My husband’s schedule can be a little overwhelming at times and at the beginning of the month he gives me the date that I can plan our night on. He gave me a Monday….:-/ But, instead of being a bad thing, this actually ended up being fantastic! I was able to get a limo for pretty close to half price, and there were no waits at any of the restaurants which would have made the evening difficult. Before we walked out to the limo, I gave my husband the dice and had him roll to determine which restaurant we would go to for drinks. He rolled Plaza Azteca. My first time there. It is a very nice little restaurant. We both ordered a medium margarita and were totally shocked that their medium was 27oz. I should probably mention that I put some of Toledo’s nicer restaurants on the dice except for the one side that had McDonald’s. There had to be some edge to it.:-) Next roll was for appetizers. It came up mancys. He was allowed to choose between their Italian restaurant or their steakhouse. He chose Italian. I had a martini and he had a beer. It’s pretty sad but I’m not totally sure what we had to eat because things began to get a bit foggy after that… The next roll took us to Ciao’s where we had a glass of wine (you can see where this is going…) and pasta. The food was incredible! I know this because I ate my leftovers the next dayL-) The last roll of the dice was for dessert and the choices were, J. Alexander’s, Beirut, or McDonald’s… He rolled J. Alexander’s. We had a glass of champagne and warm chocolate cake with ice cream. Every restaurant was incredible! Our drink combinations provided a very interesting day at work on Tuesday… This was one of Ed’s favorites!
Date Night #6 – January
This Date Night was entitled, Wine, Cheese and Games. This particular Date took me about a week and a half to prepare for. One of the things that Ed was unaware of is that I also included a couple of group dates within the 12 Date Nights. This was one of them. I invited 3 other couples over for a Wine Tasting Party. The theme was Napa Valley vs Sonoma County wines. We were going to do a blind tasting. I bought 2 each, and 1 from each location, of Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Riesling. The bottles were covered and numbered. I also purchased and prepared a ridiculous amount of food to pair with the wines. I have issues with portions when I am preparing any kind of food. I did about a 15 minute presentation on wine tasting and comparisons and food pairings. We started off the evening with Champagne. I dropped a Wild Hibiscus flower in each champagne glass before pouring. These flowers are edible and were marinated in a syrup. They seemed to bloom as the champagne was poured in and added a wonderful flavor to the champagne. Those that ate the flowers compared the texture and taste to an apricot or a fig. I was too freaked out to try it. We then did an experiment with a bottle of Merlot to show how much food pairings affect the taste of the wines. Then we started in on the tasting. To go backwards for a moment, I spent the week before the Date discussing wines with local experts and visiting several wine shops. I also did a ton of research online. I purchased enough red, white, and champagne glasses for each guest. I took all of them and dipped the bases in chalkboard paint so that the guests could keep track of their glasses by writing their names on their glasses. Unfortunately the paint did not hold up well when I washed the glasses before having the guests put them in their gift bags to take home. I’m not sure if that project was a total bust or if I just didn’t purchase the right kind of chalkboard paint…Yes there are several kinds. I also spray painted boards with chalkboard paint to write the food items down on. I printed up sheets for everyone to keep track of the various aspects of the wines and to make their comparisons and vote on each wine variety. By the way, Napa won. It was close though. I also had trivia questions for everyone to work on during the party. We didn’t totally get to the games at the end…the whole tasting lasted a little longer than I had thought but it was still a great night and I really enjoyed myself. I think everyone else did as well, including Ed Beczynski. Thanks for making the evening a succes: Tom Pounds, Liljana May Brescol, Kenny Henry, Patty Henry, Richard Rideout and Janet Rideout. Oh and I totally forgot to get a picture of Ed and I together:-( that’s what happens when you are drinking wine…
Date Night #5 – December
The theme for this Date Night was, Slumber Party. One great memory I have of growing up is Slumber Parties! Staying up all night, talking, eating, playing games and watching movies. For this date, I created a basket of slumber party type foods (popcorn, milk duds, licorice, chips, canned cheese spread, etc.,) I also bought a new pair of pajamas for both of us. The evening started off with us putting on our new pajamas. We made our own pizzas and then put them in the oven to cook. I had pushed together the couch and chaise lounge to make a comfy sleeping area. We watched 2 movies and played Yahtzee in between. The pizzas were amazing!!! Naan bread is really good. We relaxed for the entire evening and it was amazing, especially after the crazy holidays.
