Well, this is just ridiculous.
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I'm all dressed up (such as it is) in the photo because we went out to dinner last night, since my in-laws are visiting and offered to stay with the kids.
I wore comfortable shoes because I thought maybe we would take a walk across the Stone Arch Bridge before or after dinner. It was a beautiful autumn evening, clear and mid-sixties with no wind.
Mark said, "I don't own shoes that aren't comfortable."
I said, "All my shoes are comfortable enough for expected performance windows, but not all of them are expected to perform on a long walk when I am heavily pregnant."
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We didn't walk across the bridge because we didn't have time before dinner and afterwards I felt too waddly. Here is a picture I stole from the internet instead of taking it, so you can imagine what we planned on doing and didn't do.
(If you took this, and you ask me to, I'll take it down)
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You can't see the stone-archiness from the bridge itself, of course. This is what it looks like from a place where you can see it:
Only it was dark, and clear. Lovely night to be out. Instead we wandered around the university area and looked at construction sites and the big warehousey factory of the Metal-Matic corporation, where they turn metal sheets into custom-ordered metal tubing. It was the end of the workday and the big sliding doors were open, and you could see onto the floor.
So that was interesting to look at, and it's not the kind of thing I can steal pictures from the internet about, unless maybe I took it from the company's website (she says, and then checks, and finds that it's a little short on glossy stock photos.)
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We went to Restaurant Alma, which I think will now be my go-to recommendation for people coming in from out of town and wanting upper-end good food. Its schtick is a prix-fixe three-course dinner of fairly small plates where you select each of the three courses from a list, and then you can add a wine flight which they will match to your dinner.
Mark had a bison carpaccio with a sweeter-than-I-expected chenin blanc, and a sweet corn soup with smoked salmon that came with what I think was a pinot grigio, and a really outstanding poached sturgeon with potatoes and bacon that came with a red wine that I failed to taste. (I commented that I could probably recreate the sturgeon dish with cod if he wanted me to give it a try sometime).
I had a dish of kohlrabi-apple slaw with glazed pork belly, and a mushroom farrotto (very like a risotto) with shaved asiago cheese and a soft-boiled egg on top — I am a sucker for soft-boiled eggs, love them at all hours — and a crispy trout with sticky rice and coconut-ginger-chile broth. I wished for more sticky rice, but the meal was otherwise close to perfect.
I said no to the wine flight, because I was delighted to find my favorite sweet stout on the beer list — Left Hand Brewing Company's Milk Stout — and I drank that happily with the pork belly and the mushroom thing, and then switched to sparkling water to go with the fish since one beer is really, quite seriously, my upper limit. (And stout with crispy Thai-flavored fish? Um, no. But it was really perfect with the pork belly.)
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I could have claimed this as my birthday dinner out, but I told Mark I wanted to go out somewhere with the kids for my birthday. They like a party, and this way I won't wind up baking myself a cake. I suggested brunch at a local place that does an outstanding brunch with these caramel roll ring things.
And then I remembered that we will be spending my birthday with friends. So that complicates things. But maybe we can still manage to do something festive. Or maybe we can do it on not-really-my-real-birthday. I don't mind having multiple birthdays.
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The other project of this week: Mark is taking several days off work — they had been saved for a family vacation that fell through — to do some projects around the house. This is why my in-laws are up visiting, so that Mark's dad can help him. They pulled a fence and some young trees out of our front yard and put in some winter rye grass seed to try to halt the front-yard erosion, readying it to plant sedum in the spring. And then they started working on our basement climbing wall:
It wraps around three walls, the overhang bit, and part of the ceiling.
Route-setting will have to wait until the wall-to-wall padded floor is complete, which won't happen this weekend. The key was to get all the heavy pieces of plywood up while my FIL is here to help.
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All right… time for breakfast. I have some fresh plums and pecans to put on my cereal that my in-laws brought up for us. Lucky me!
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