Quiet Night Out

TLomL and I haven't had a night out in months--we had an afternoon out in December, though, so that almost counts. More out of determination to rectify that than a real desire to do something, we made arrangements for last night. Yesterday, we'd talked ourselves out of our planned activity due to total lack of interest and Boise being too far to travel for something we had half-hearted interest in at best.

It's strange, we used to drive there a few times a week--and now when we're living closer to the interstate than ever, it's a major undertaking. Seriously, when we lived in Boise it took us almost as much time to get to any of the major points of interest there as it would now.

Anywho, we'd already had childcare arranged (the greatest hurdle for us to overcome), so we felt we'd better do something. The best we could come up with was going to a chain restaurant we frequently go to anyway. But we changed it up quite dramatically: no kids, and instead of entrées, we had shared a couple of appetizers. How's that for wild?

It took practically no time at all to realize we had nothing to talk about beyond our food and drink--the quality of fried mozzarella differing so much from eatery to eatery. We maybe spent five sentences talking about the kids' schooling, that's all I can remember that didn't involve what we were consuming. We found ourselves ready to return home within an hour (would've been sooner, but our server clearly realized she wasn't getting much of a tip from us and paid us due attention), but that didn't seem right, so we went to a chain coffee shop, had a specialty drink and shared a brownie (which provided a bit more conversation, "hmmm, you can taste the espresso in this," "sure can, and it's chewy, too.") Naturally, their closing time was fifteen minutes after we arrived. So we were probably away from home almost 2 hours in the end.

As strange as it sounds, it really was a very nice time. It's probably dull to read about, certainly doesn't seem terribly fun on the surface, just a couple of hours of light snacking and saying uninteresting things about good, but wholly unremarkable food. And that's one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is that I got to spend a couple of hours with my favorite person in the world, and it doesn't get better than that.