Another birthday

Well, its been awhile. Amidst boxes, and packing and cleaning, life has been a bit cluttered these days, thus the lack of blogging about said life. But, my OCD will not allow me to blog about more recent events until I finish what I started...

Robert's birthday follows mine very closely. I wanted to do something special and so I made a few calls to friends for some ideas and made a few plans. A friend told me about a place called Carmine's which is actually a gourmet grocery. Now, you may be thinking, "taking him to a grocery for a date?" Hold on. attached to the grocery is a restaurant. One side of the restaurant is upscale, fancy and the other side is a more relaxed pizzeria.

Ok, so here's what happened. I called during the day asking to make a reservation. They said they did not give reservations to parties of less than 6. I asked if it would be busy and they assured me that no, there would be plenty of places. We arrived to a cram-packed restaurant and were told it was a 15 minute wait. Not what they said but not too bad. They said we could walk around the grocery to pass the time so we did. We returned to the restaurant to wait and noticed a few tables opening up (We had originally requested an outdoor table). We went to the hostess and told her that we were ok with the next available table (having already told her in the beginning that we did not want to sit in the pizzeria). In about 2 minutes a man came to seat us and proceeded to take us to the Pizzeria side. We sat down on plastic chairs and were in the middle of the room surrounded by people, with our view being the bakery or the butcher of the grocery store (I can't remember which one). Now, before you think we are just being stuck up and rude people, understand this: the menu was $30 meals (to be eaten while sitting on plastic chairs) and when the man seated us at a 4 person table, he asked if we wanted him to find some friends to sit with us. He was most likely joking, but added to all the rest of the night, we didn't really think it was that funny. We felt very jostled and that money was the only thing that mattered, not our enjoyment of the evening. We got up and left.

You can imagine how I felt. I'm a failure at date planning! :) By this time it was quite late on a friday night so everywhere else we thought of was already packed out as well. Robert, being the upbeat husband he is, suggested we just go to the mall and have a good time. So, we went to the food court for supper and then had Haagen Daz ice cream for dessert (which by the way, we are now VIP members- that's another story altogether).

With all this going on, I never got a picture of us on his birthday :( Despite everything, my husband had a great spirit and rolled with the punches and we had a wonderful time on his birthday!