Adventure #3: Unity, or Lock it, Pop it, Polkadot it

so this post is not about saskaspooning. is that okay? it is, however, about limited choices...and making the best with what you've got. (please note photo is from when i visited the week before hence the reference to the fast and the furious on the sign...)

so patrick's been in unity now for awhile. he's trapped there for work and so we have not been able to saskaspoon. so i went there for the weekend and entertained myself while he worked. this is pretty much how regular couples spend their time but for us this was unusual--we mostly see one another when we are both off work, but here we were, with him working and me at the hotel, writing things and reading a novel and taking my bike out for rides, and then he comes home from work and we spend the evening together. very strange for us but i think sort of like life for the majority of you who live in the same city as your partner.

anyway. we decided we needed something to do on saturday night, and we had two choices, it being unity, a small town in the north west of the province. it has one movie theatre with one screen (attached to a bowling alley, the family's apartment is off the back and the whole family runs it all, very sweet, very much a coming-of-age book in waiting, don't you think?) and this weekend all that was playing was hannah montana: the movie.

it was either see hannah montana or go to the Unity School of Dance recital. we were actually pretty torn -- neither one of us particularly wanted to see miley cyrus' (and her creepy dad's) movie, but we did want to see inside the small town theatre. i think the dance recital might have won out if the idea of seeing inside the movie-theatre-cum-bowling-alley didnt seem so romantic and small townish.

so we went to the movies. the kid at the ticket booth looked shocked to see us, and i told patrick later we should have told him our daughter had died years ago; "she would have been nine...." just to give him a good story. my mum told me later we should have told the kid we were having an adulterous affair and needed a dark place to "neck".

anyway, we paid the 7$ each and got a jumbo tub of popcorn for 3$, plus a lime slush puppy for a dollar. the theatre was filled with small girls and their reluctant brothers. there were not a lot of parents--i got the feeling a lot of kids got dropped off. patrick and i are neither one of us very tall but we were like two huge gullivers in lilliput, i swear.

we had a fine time. the kids around us laughed and laughed and laughed at all the stupid stuff that i didnt think eight year olds actually laughed at, and the lime slush puppy was delicious (thanks for sharing, patrick). i am a bit sad i missed the dance recital. the girls in the dance school were lucky, though; there were so many of them in the dance recital on friday and saturday nights who wanted to see hannah montanathat the theatre owners were going to show a matinee on sunday, just for them ....

ps hannah montana has a dangerous message, by the way. apparently, even though you may want to end the facade and just be yourself, it is okay and in fact preferred if you hide your true inner soul if it pleases your fans.

Adventure #2: The Keg

because patrick lives out of town, we don't get to saskaspoon as often as we'd like to. but we had an opportunity on the weekend and so we once again drove downtown to steal some wifi.

it's pretty fun beginning a saskaspoon adventure. because we dont know where we'll end up, we always start in the downtown area, in the car, poised to go. downtown has wifi which is our real reason to start there, but once i move into my new house next month which i plan on making wireless, we might just start from my living room. but i like it when we start in the car--it's like we're ready for the race to begin. once we shake the iphone we're OFF! like horses from a starting gate or participants in that grocery store game show (does anyone remember that? people pushed their carts through a pretend grocery store grabbing items for points?)

anyway, after our last meal out with the urban spoon i was a bit anxious, and had not packed a snack. so i was hungry. so imagine my delight when i shook the iphone and found we were being sent to the Keg on Grosvenor.

"talk about extremes," we mused. to go from the sketchy, foodless coffee shop to a fairly pricey steak house was a bit strange. after all, there are many, many restaurants in the urban spoon where we might have ended up. perhaps this was the program's way of making up for my teeny tiny microwaved pies of our last adventure.

anyway, we were driving over there and i read one of the urban spoon reviews. "Really busy during the recession; expect an hour and a half wait on saturdays."

we were confused by this: what makes a 30$/plate restaurant recession-friendly?? and did we really want to wait an hour and a half to eat? well, we had no choice: we had rules to follow.

luckily it would seem most of our fellow recession-sufferers were at home eating gold-plated pizza because we had the restaurant mostly to ourselves.

as we were waiting for our food to arrive, patrick said, "i feel like something's missing..." and he realized it was that anxious feeling one gets when one is trying to sort out a place to eat. patrick observed that saskaspooning certainly takes the stress out of going to restaurants. he and i dont see one another very often, and when we do we are trying to cram it all in to each visit--love and fun and adventure and also just sitting around in our pyjamas. in the past, picking a restaurant would sometimes result in a tense "where do you want to go?" conversation that would escalate into a dizzying back-and-forth that would ultimately find us at EE Burritoes once again. so it was certainly a relief to just show up at a prescribed place and just be together without having to debate about where to go to be together.

and then i got drunk.

here's how that happened: along with my meal (steak, stuffed potato, veggies, spinach salad --patrick had garlic mashed potatoes and prime rib, we shared tempura veggies, which were overdoughy--dont expect the keg to do japanese well, i guess, is the lesson there) i had a glass of wine.

i thought i'd ordered white, but the waiter brought me a sickely sweet glass of rose. "hmm," i said, "this tastes like juice." i started to drink it but wondered, secretly and ashamedly, if my knowledge of wine was that bad. i have never thought myself a sommalier, or anything, but hoped i knew enough to recognize that a sauvignon blanc is not, normally, pink.

anyway, we were halfway through our food when the waiter showed up and offered me my ACTUAL glass of wine. guess hes not a sommalier, either. so he brought me a much nicer white and i got to drink both.

by the end of the meal patrick had eaten all his food but i had half my salad, half my steak, and half my potato and half my veggies left (this was planned). i als had had half my fruitjuice wine (this was not planned). the waiter came along to pack up my leftovers. "i wish once could take home half-drunk glasses of wine," i said plaintively, and didnt that just clinch it, because our waiter then brought me a children's travel cup with a lid with a hole for a straw.

"so you can take your wine with you," he said, charmingly. we left him a pretty lousy tip (15.5%) but i wrote him a lovely, drunkish note of thanks.