2000-10-29 1 am
Long catchup
This has been an eventful week. I haven't written the account of Mark's birthday. Monday night I took him out for a real date. Whenever I suggest the concept of us having a "date" Mark gets defensive and says that that is fine for couples with children that need to carve out time together but that we do stuff together all the time and those are dates so we don't need to plan any. I disagree so I made sure we had a date for his birthday.
I got my work done over the weekend and early on Monday so I could come home and get ready. I gave myself some big poofy hair and I believe that got more reaction from Mark than anything else we did all evening. He said he was surprised every time he looked up.
We ate dinner at the Castle Hill Cafe. When I first moved to Austin I would pass it there on the corner of 5th and Baylor and thought it was, truly, a cafe where I might go to lunch. Luckily, I read that it was an upscale, more expensive restaurant, before I went it expecting to have a greasy hamburger and some fries. It really was a wonderful restaurant and not outrageously expensive. We all have different ideas of expensive. When I mentioned that I was taking Mark there to my friend Steve, who is quite well off, he commented that it wasn't expensive. To me, it was expensive but not too expensive for a nice dinner. Entrees around $17 to $20. We had a really wonderful bottle of wine and a fabulous appetizer called Lucinda's Torta (I think)that was cream cheese with basil and sundried tomatoes mixed in and topped with peanuts and served with small soft rounds of bread. We had salads, mine with a delicious soy ginger dressing that made me think of Chinese food, and a dessert that was sort of a soft frothy banana pudding in a flaky crispy shell. I had an entree of salmon with black beans and corn on it. Hard to descibe but absolutely heaven on a fork.
I had thought we might go to the Brown Bar after dinner because I had heard it was a nice, quiet, elegant bar, but I also suggested we could go to Ego's to see the Dale Watson Band and Mark liked that idea more. There was a good crowd there but still room for us. Mark sat in for about four songs with Dale and really enjoyed that. He'd never played with Dale before. I told him it might be a bad idea. One of these days Dale will need a drummer and he's bound to call Mark and that will put Mark in the delimma of having to choose. I like to prevent any kind of change coming into my life at any point in the future. I think Mark liked the idea of Dale wanting him to be his drummer.
We stayed until the end of the night (I think). We imbibed quite heavily through the evening, after the full bottle of wine, so we were in a state we are quite unfamiliar with. And I hope to return to that sober place for a long time in the future. But it was fun.
Friday night we went to Jovita's for Mexican food and to see the Lucky Pierres. They are a band from Dallas that I had never seen. Their steel player and Mark were in a band together called the Cartwrights back in the early 1990s. The Cartwrights were a fabulous "punk country" band before everybody and their dog began doing punk country. They were a lot of fun. It was good to see Kim again because he always liked us a lot. Jovita's chicken enchiladas verde were out of this world good, too. I've not been much of a fan of the food at Jovita's but they won me over Friday.
Food, food, food. It is on my mind.
Today I attempted to give our new found puppy a bath. Checkers/Cassie/puppy (we haven't settled on a name because we do not want to keep her) came to us over a week ago, so, according to the city of Austin, she is now OUR dog and needs to have shots and spaying and tags, etc. We are not ready to make that commitment to her. Tomorrow there is a friend of a friend coming to take a look and I hope they love her and take her home or we will have to take her to the shelter. Our dogs don't like her and we can't afford her. I only have two hands to pet dogs. Two is enough.
But I decided puppy needed a bath because she was beginning to smell like the other dogs and this has been an awfully muddy week. I gave her a bath in the bathtub and, good lord, you could have stuffed a couch with the hair that that puppy shed. I've been cleaning all night, trying to get it all vacuumed up.
I had an amazing experience this week. My sister and I have both read up on feng shui and we're always talking about enhancing our "prosperity corner" in order to help our financial situations. Last weekend when I visited she was getting her family organized to clean the garage as I left. They got it clean and she wrote yesterday that this week her husband had made three huge sales of diamonds, two to clients he had never even dealt with before. After she cleaned her garage (but before I had heard about the sales) I cleaned our patio (my prosperity corner) because the dogs had practically destroyed it during the rain. They usually live outside in the yard but I let them up on the porch when it is raining because they have no doghouse. I cleaned it all up and re-hung a windchime that had been taken down. Everything was shipshape. I thought to myself that I didn't know how any extra prosperity could come along unless maybe it was a second job (I've applied for a couple). Yesterday I got a check in the mail for $214. It was a settlement check from a class action lawsuit against a credit card company with which I hold a credit card. I didn't know there even was a suit (although I did know there were complaints about the practices of this company although I have had no problems). How is that for a sudden windfall when I desperately needed it? Weird, huh?
I'm working to get some voice-over work or some more radio work. This week things seemed to fall in line nicely in making it happen. I hope I have good things to report in the days to come. That is an avenue I have never quite known how to pursue, but this week I talked to some people that do it every week and they made it sound easy for me to get into.
I've got a roast in the crockpot for Sunday lunch and I'm hoping it is another lazy rainy day.