Just a week-end

Friday afternoon we met Stacy's mom, Yvonne, and dad, Orlando for cocktail hour at, of all places, a hotel bar. Stacy and I have visited just about every bar in the city and thought that this newly redone pub with a nice spread of appetizers would be fun. A modern affair with a lot of sweeping curves and oversized booths and the like and a "Karaoke" piano that played along with the jukebox.

After we ditched the parents (or they ditched us), we went to one of our favorite places, Ralph's, for a quick and fattening dinner. It's half bar and half restaurant, a lot of Italian dishes, plus steak, hamburgers, the usual, but a big square pizza is still under four dollars and my hot turkey sandwich with baked potato was $5.50. Sometimes it is so crowded that the host tries to convince you not to wait for a table, like, "It'll be at least forty five minutes if you want to wait that long." The wait, meanwhile, is never as long as they say, but just long enough for one more cocktail.

Yesterday was spent digging into domestic chores, mowing the lawn, weeding the garden (totally overgrown with weeds), moving my home office from the bedroom to the kitchen nook to give Stacy a bit more room and both of us a little more privacy.
Then we settled into a lovely late afternoon of wine, cheese, olives, avocado, tomatoes from our garden, a variety of flavored oils to dip a crusty bread, crackers, capers, and some other snacky items, out on the patio with a light cool breeze.