late installments, part 2: april 28

i had't had a real vacation since july when jon, chris, sarah and i went to jon's friends' cabin for a few days. and since i'd been REALLY missing my sanity, and jon had been really missing my sanity, too, so we jumped at the chance to go camping with our friends liz and john at the end of april. we went west to wyalusing where the mississippi and wisconsin rivers come together just for an overnight on friday, but it was so worth it. if you're reading this and need a vacation, go to wyalusing. now.

john had a gig saturday night, so we all grudgingly packed up our tents and settled in for the not quite 2 hour ride home that afternoon. since liz and john were driving, jon and i napped on and off in the backseat, leaving us with not nearly enough energy to make dinner, but with just enough to wisely make saturday night our date night.

as you may have guessed, jon's been doing all the planning lately. this is because i've been too stressed out lately to take on the planning, so my date nights become the ones where i cry because i'm too stressed out and planning has pushed me over the edge. my loving fiance has graciously taken it upon himself to brainstorm ideas and ease the burden for the time being. he's so great. but i digress ...

anyway, since it was up to him, he chose casa de lara.

i NEVER would have chosen casa de lara.

this is because i once went with an old boyfriend to the one on state street and vowed i would never return - not because of the memories of the boy (though i'm sure that doesn't help casa de lara's case), but because of the memories of the lighting. all i see when i think of that place is nasty florescent pink lighting, sleezy men dressed like miami vice's don johnson, and old, tired mexican food that appears to have been sitting under a heat lamp for over 24 hours.

to be fair, the only thing that rings absolutely true of the place is the florescent pink lighting, but florescent pink lighting equates with all those things i listed above, and, therefore, warmly invites those images into my memory. so why would i want to go back?

because i love jon.

"you just need to try it again," he'd been saying for the past few months. so i agreed finally.

"but only to the one on fish hatchery," i stubbornly insisted. "i am NOT going to the one on state street."

so we went to the one on fish hatch. because jon loves me.

i admit it. casa de lara is not all awful. in fact, it was pretty good. the night was just chilly enough where we chose not to sit outside on the patio (though they've got great outdoor seating). they've got about 3 different "rooms" plus the outside seating, so there's plenty of room for lots of people. the lighting and the decorations are pretty dang colorful, and much classier than the horrid, 80s themed state street branch. the chips & salsa keep coming, and that's always a plus. our meals were pleasantly large, but not memorable. i suppose it is what it is, but i wouldn't consider this any adobo grill.

i can't remember what i got to eat, but i did love my margarita. they do that well, i confess. so even if the food isn't memorable, that doesn't mean it wasn't tasty. i found myself enjoying my time there so much, i nominated it as a contender for our rehearsal dinner after we finished our meal. i suppose i'll have to go back casa de lara and consider it again.

wow, i never thought i'd hear myself say that.

april 23rd late installment

so monday, april 23rd was scheduled to be an uber-relaxing, take your time waking up, totally chill out kind of day. but when i got a call from jon early in the morning that my brother-in-law had left a voicemail on his phone, sharing that he was at the hospital with my sister, the day took a turn for what any thinking person would consider "crazy."

so my sister was okay, just a bad stomach virus that made her feel something akin to contractions. but while we were visiting her at st.mary's, i got a call from our realtor who informed us that the offer we'd put in for a house had been joined by two other offers ... so to her office we'd have to go to counter our own offer.

the whole day was go-go-go, so by the time we hit late afternoon, i was desperate to get my life in order, and jon was desperate for a run. and by the time he got back to my house, it was nearly 8 pm, and neither of us were ready for an official date night (read: what's nearby?).

thank god famous dave's is so close to my house. bbq it was. we love bbq, and you can't go wrong with the baked beans or the firecracker green beans or the hot applesauce or the cornbread on the side. i was particularly pleased with my beer, berghoff's hefe-weizen blend (i think ... jon's not around right now to tell me i'm wrong, but it was light and citrusy, so i'm going to say it was a hefe regardless of being right or wrong). i never drink berghoff, but the waiter was so enthused, i couldn't pass it up. turns out he was rightly enthused. it was so fresh, so crisp, so citrusy, i'd take it over a blue moon any day. check it out when you hit up famous dave's next.

we spent the good part of the evening there, talking through our day, discussing the possibility of losing this house we'd been so excited about, and just enjoying comfort food on a day that necessitated it. we left full and happy. thanks, famous dave's.

and that was it for date night. we might have considered a movie ... if we hadn't received a call at 10:30 pm from our realtor, congratulating us on becoming homeowners.

turns out the day ended even crazier than it began :)

bbq & bball

i think when you've committed yourself to writing up your date nights on a public blog, you have the potential of overwhelming yourself with a need to do something uber-creative for the sake of your audience (be it all 3 or 30 of you who read this). thankfully, we love each other more than we love you (though we think you're all very lovely people), so we are learning to choose dates that are right for us.

and that's just what we did last monday.

as usual, we wiped ourselves out last weekend, visiting family in eau claire, traveling up to the twin cities for a good friend's wedding, and driving back in time for work early sunday morning. so by monday, we were ready to take it easy.

date night started with a walk out to the washington hotel coffee room located on lakeside right off lake monona. we had intended to just grab coffee at cargo coffee since it's so close to my house, but for god-only-knows-why, cargo closes at a ridiculously early hour so we extended our walk for a few blocks.

neither of us is washington hotel coffee room's biggest fan. for a few reasons: 1) it's eerily quiet making conversation frowned upon, 2) we're not knitters, so we just really don't belong, and 3) if you're gonna order a sandwich, subway's really got better bang for the buck. but if you're a lakeside fibers junkie, this is the place for you. but as i said, not being knitters, we knew better than to overstay our welcome (feeling awkward anyway just daring to converse with each other in this sanctuary of silence), so we took our coffees and enjoyed the short walk back to my house.

ah yes, date night at my house. and it was excellent.

jon is the king of the BBQ, so he entertained me with a full meal including his signature fall-off-the-bone ribs. YUM. i am a very lucky woman, and will be a very lucky wife :)

the meal was an appetizer to the night's main event (though i really believe the main event proved itself to be quite unsatisfying in comparison): the ncaa men's basketball championship, florida vs. ohio state.

honestly, with wisconsin out, a girl's gotta cheer for the remaining big ten team, and oden had been growing me. and tell me who in good conscience can route for florida? really.

but we all know how the game turned out. and we all saw noah make a fool of himself on national tv. and we all wondered if florida is really concerned with turning out articulate, thoughtful, intelligent adults or if we ought to encourage high schools to scrap scholastics and focus all their energies on training a handful of potential athletes to compete for scholarships to schools who will fail to prepare their students for careers actually beneficial to the real world. okay, maybe i just wondered that.

i digress. i love college basketball. and i love ribs. and i love coffee. so here's to jon: well done, babe. good date night.

old enough?

Let me begin this week’s post with some humble advice. For those of you out there engaged or about to be engaged or for that matter ever plan on getting engaged allow me to highly recommend a short engagement. There are a number of reasons for this but as it relates to this blog I recommend this course of action because planning a wedding will HIGHLY affect your day off.

After a tiring morning and afternoon of looking at potential reception sites it was time to turn the corner and have fun. We headed over to Greenbush Bar on Regent St. We had just been there a few days ago with other members of my family only to find out that since they are a bar everyone in the party needs to either be your child, spouse or over 21. The annoying thing that night was that they first seated us and then a few minutes later asked to see our ids so we had to leave and ended up heading to Nam’s down the street for a great meal.

On Monday night we sat down without a problem next to a family with little kids and a young college couple and ordered a couple of beers. We tried to drown out all wedding conversation with a plate of garlic cheese bread that was good and would have been amazing if the marinara sauce would have not been cold and then came our garlic, pepperoni and green pepper pizza. Overall all the food and drinks were good but the service was lacking and the prior experience left me with a B- impression of Greenbush BAR.

(wrong barriques)
After dinner we headed over to Barriques on Monroe St. for a couple of loaded drinks and the chance to just sit back read, write and talk. The place was busy compared to many of our Monday night experiences and for good reason. It is a great place to get a drink with friends whether your prefer tea, coffee, beer or wine. Or you can plug into an ipod and read. Mary and I stayed there till close and thus ended another night of exploring a couple Madison’s many options.

seat of your pants

As Mary and I explore Madison we tend to approach the night with either a well-defined plan or spontaneous desire. Those two approaches usually line up according to our personality types so Mary being the one who is able to be more laid back decided to create the night as it came.

She knew we were headed to a lecture/performance that was part of the Line Breaks series at the Wisconsin Historical Society but it was too early to head over there and we were both hungry. So we started walking down State Street waiting for inspiration. It struck quickly as we decided to just take the edge off and wait on dinner until after the lecture so we ducked into Einstein Bros (I have never called it that until now) for a coffee and bagel. I am not much of a bagel connoisseur but their apple-something-something bagels are tasty.

So with coffee in hand we walked the short distance to the Historical building. As we took a seat and got comfortable, I was not really sure what we were in for but I was hoping to learn something new. I was not disappointed. First off, I have very little experience with seeing or hearing spoken word art and I found the host's opening performance powerful. Then after creating an open definition of hip hop, Kamilah Forbes, Executive Producer of Russell Simmons’ HBO Def Poetry Jam was introduced.

Most of what was discussed was eye-opening to me and created a number of interesting questions about art, culture, television and the line between artistic integrity and selling out to The Man. This series continues through the end of April; we hope to go back to experience and learn more.

Towards the end, the Q &A portion was starting to feel a little long, so we headed out to find something to fill our now grumbling bellies. Mary narrowed our choices down to getting a good burger, so we found it convenient to be so close to one of Madison’s favorite burger places, Dotty’s.


We quickly ordered some burgers, fries and beer and sat back to discuss the many questions and ideas recently created by the aforementioned lecture.

And thus ended another good date night.

why gift cards make for good date nights.

i know, i know. i'm late to post. we had tried making a new year's resolution that date night couldn't happen unless the person responsible for the past week's post had actually posted. but last night, we still went out. i played the "i've been sick" card, and so - perhaps because it was my night to pay? - we did date night anyway.

but here's the follow up from february 5th:

as much as gift cards can seem like the ultimate cop-out present, they provided an imaginative date night for us a couple of weeks ago. with an envelope packed full of thin plastic cards to all sorts of places (though, to be honest, coffeeshops dominated the bunch), jon and i drove towards the east side. on our way, jon laid out the two rules to the evening:

1) we have to spend all the money on the gift card.
2) we can only spend 10% over what's on the gift card.

our first stop was at family christian bookstores to which jon had received a $5 gift card. among the plethora of gadgets and gizmos imprinted with fish and jesus logos (this is a whole other subject for another day and another post; i will certainly make an abnormally long and passionate tangent if i don't stop writing now), we found a box of chocolates quite quickly, and exited. fast.

so we took our box of chocolates (which cost $0.23 over our $5 - woohoo!!) and hurried through the cold to the cool beans cafe just next door.

i love the vibe of cool beans. i love the orange lights (pictures to come) and the alterra coffee served and the tables and the chairs. and i love the fireplace. and i love the people-watching. if i didn't live on the near west side, i'd be there way more frequently.

with $10 to spend at cool beans, we did quite well staying within the total. sort of. i'm not counting the pound of coffee jon bought himself since buying things for ourselves is hardly date night protocol. but we enjoyed our medium chais and lattes and chocolates and played a couple games of cribbage (or which i lost all the but the last game - and then only by one point).

dinner was at paisan's, a restaurant i haven't been to since it was located at university square during my college years. its new location, on lake monona over by the monona terrace, is quite large, which meant is quite empty for our monday night excursion. we were seated in a booth overlooking the veranda which overlooks the lake. a fire at the end of the 6 booth aisle warmed us up on the cold night while we looked through paisan's extensive menu.

jon's gift certificate to paisan's was plentiful at $40, so we debated a bit with our beers at our side (three cheers for capital brewery's maibock!) and finally decided on the medium deluxe combo pizza, hopeful that paisan's claim to have famous thin crust pizzas would prove that famous = delicious.

so first the bread came (always yum - i will never be a no-carbs girl), and then my iceberg lettuce salad, and then our pizza.

it was good. i mean i don't know if i'd go around telling people about our pizza, so i'd not advocate for using the word "famous" in relation to paisan's, but it was good, and i enjoyed it. but mostly i appreciated that they were open till 11 pm on a monday night, and that the service was friendly and not intrusive.

and the best part? keeping close to our rules of not going far over 10% over the gift card. man, it feels good not to drop a lot of cash ...

so i take back my initial claim of gift cards being a cop-out gift. i would gladly accept them. it makes for a great date night.

and if you want to send me one, i'll gladly email you with my address :)