Friday, September 21, 2007

Birthday Weekend

Sunday is Jess's birthday and she's taken the weekend off and lined up a bevy of birthday activities of her choice, along with one surprise from me. Yesterday we (mostly her) cleaned the house and finished up most of our new fence.

Now that the fence is up, we tried letting Idge out for some supervised yard time, while we enjoyed dinner in our new private yard. She's 15 years old, very well behaved as long as food isn't involved and far too lazy to scale the 6 foot fence. Not surprisingly, the first thing she did was start eating grass, which we knew would make a reappearance, mostly likely on the carpet (it did).

Today I sprung for massages for both of us, after which we tea at Alberta St Teahouse. I used to spend hours there studying, as it's usually a pretty mellow atmosphere but today the tea was over-brewed, the wifi signal problematic and there were lots of noisy kids around. We left and Jess decided on a movie and some frozen custard for our date night. We've been wanting to see Ratatouille for a while so we suffered the Lloyd Mall theatre, arriving late to miss the commercials.

I really enjoyed the movie, though it wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as I expected based on reviews from friends. But it was a good story with amazing animation work.

Afterwards, we went all the way to land of strip malls (Vancouver), in search of local frozen custard just like Jess used to have in her home town of Wisconsin. She's been missing it for quite some time. She thought she'd found a place in Lake Oswego but when we went there a couple of months ago, they had closed. This place was not only open, but stays open till 11:00pm on the weekends and was doing brisk window and drive-through business when we arrived just after 9:00.

The menu board was overwhelming and I was having a hard time motivating in the chill of the evening. I asked Jess if she wanted to share and she gave me a rare firm answer: No. She knew exactly what she wanted and from the sound of it, I'd be lucky ot get a bite of it, much less half. I was on my own. In the end, I went freestyle and got a sundae with oreos, hot fudge and whip cream.

You know what's worse than forgetting your camera? *Thinking* you forgot your camera when you actually have it! I think I mentioned that I'm having a dumb streak right now. So I can't show you a picture of the epic tower of whip cream that topped my sundae. It took a while just to dig through to the fudge-oreo goodness, but my effort was well rewarded. It was my perfect ice cream, already soft. Jess pronounced the texture good, but the flavor slightly lacking her girlhood memories of custard.

I gave it my best effort, but the density of custard isn't for the wimpy and I couldn't quite finish it. Besides, I could feel a month of my life-span disappearing as I ate. It was really good, but I wouldn't want to have it too often. It's probably a good thing that A) summer is pretty much over, weather wise and B) the custard is 13 miles from our house.

Now we're back home with our laptops, novels, tea and kitty antics to amuse us.

Tomorrow: A scenic train tour around Mt Hood.

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