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.

italian dishes and indoor putt-putt

a couple of weeks ago now (i know, i know - late again!!), jon and i spent another exhausting monday wedding planning (less than 5 months to go!), and we needed a solid break to just hang out. so even though jon had hoped we'd go to the uw's distinguished lecture series, i put in my request to hang out with jon and jon alone. i mean, i can enjoy a good lecture most of the time, but i enjoy jon and jon alone all of the time (ooh, brownie points).

so jon rearranged his plans and drove us out to tutto pasta in middleton for a classic italian dinner.

my memories of tutto pasta are limited to first dates at their location on state street - big portions, small tables, and flirty smiles and conversations (i swear, if you weren't watching a game in the bar there, you were on a first date).

contrast that to middleton's tutto pasta - same big portions, but much larger tables and booths, and, well, it's middleton, so your customers are much more varied in age; and though i couldn't spot any first-daters from our vantage point in the the aforementioned ginormous booth, this is not to say that an older customer isn't on a first date. i just want to make that clear. god knows who for, i just don't want anyone taking issue with me (i had a long day yesterday).

but back to the point, so jon and i are sitting in this huge booth that felt like it could have been a private room all on its own had they just strung a curtain rod across the top or added on a dutch door. i love huge booths because they feel totally unnecessary to me. the rest of the room is relatively small (i admit, i was raised in the burbs, so i'm used to "big"). i'd say you'd max out at 125 in there (more if everyone squished into a booth?). the lighting was just right with candles glowing a warm orange and the crooning 50s era tunes suggested you enjoy your time and order another glass of wine. oh, the power of musical influence.

our college-age-ish waiter seemed pleased that his tip for the night would be taken from a bill including a bottle of wine, so he was really cool with us all night. i, for one, love a good waiter who interacts with his customers. i always like to ask waiters what they'd recommend from the menu (i think they really should know it best), and was pleased with my mozzarella, garlic, tomato penne (i have to admit that it wasn't a mouthwatering recipe and didn't thrill me, but, to be frank, i haven't been to very many italian restaurants that do create such masterpieces). jon ordered some sort of pesto penne, which i think would have tasted better had it not been such an unappetizing shade of green (yes, i know pesto is green anyway, but it was REALLY green).

after our leisurely dinner, we raced over to dick vitense's new indoor mini golf land. sadly, the course closes at 9 pm; happily, the golf attendant charged us half since we came about 15-20 minutes before close.

the new course is created to represent all of madison's major landmarks. if we hadn't been racing through there, i might have enjoyed reading about the creation of capitol building, or spending more time in the black light back hallway where vitense recognizes rhythm and booms. lakes mendota and monona are both prominently featured, each offering a distraction of remote controlled boats should you be playing a particularly shoddy game of mini-golf.

the staff at vitense was unusually gracious, allowing us to finish up our game a few minutes after 9. but with such an early finish to our dinner & mini-golf, what was there to do next?

and herein lies another reason why i enjoy dating jon so much: there's so little lag time between his ideas. so off we went to barnes and nobles for a few games of cribbage (it's officially beat out my love for euchre, i admit). we appreciated seeing the couple at the table next to us pull out their own cribbage board. if we see them again next week, maybe we'll invite them to join us ...

so we officially ended date night with that, since at 10:30 pm, jon had to be at breakaway playing a late game with his soccer team. i joined him, since it feels rather schoolgirlish to watch your boyfriend from the fan stands (and is a whole lot cooler than being a lame-o and going to bed before letterman even gets on the air).

*just a side note, i did feel pretty sick to my stomach later on that evening - which may have partly been due to the fact that huge chunks of mozzarella are probably not a good idea for my sensitive stomach. if you might lean that way, i suggest staying away from the cheesy selections on the menu.