Sushi and Meatballs

Last week, Vivian and I celebrated what we've come to call our "sushi anniversary," the anniversary of the date we officially became a dating couple back in 2007. Vivian asked me, "So, you want to make it official" right after we'd had dinner at Sakura Bana, so we've made it a tradition ever since. This time, we visited Sushi Japan Yakiniku Boy and ordered the gigantic Sushi for Two.

On Friday, we set up the Eagle's Lodge for Jitterbugs Night Out and wound up staying the whole night dancing with our usual cast of characters. We did have a couple visitors — the proprietors of the Tannenbaum Christmas Shop in the Old Market and the candy shop next door dropped in to dance. The former had apparently been a swing dancer even before Nate and Christy started, and the latter had met Vivian some time earlier when she first took a swing dancing class at Metro Community College. We'd visited his candy shop on our first date.

On Saturday, we celebrated International Gluttony Day. We dropped by a Sizzler for lunch just for fun, and then went to Cici's Pizza Buffet with a bunch of our friends from GAMe. Then we trotted over to Westwood Cinema to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and felt quite full afterward. It was a surprisingly hilarious movie — I'd read the back way back in elementary school and had been thoroughly unimpressed. It's usual feat to turn a short children's book into a decent feature-length film, but this time they pulled it off (and did a heck of a lot better than Where the Wild Things Are).

Cold days, warm houses

Greetings from the arctic midwest! Winter came in like a lion this year, and after a couple weeks of blizzards, sub-zero temperatures, and freezing drizzle, I would say we're due for one heck of a "lamb" this spring. In the meantime, Vivian and I are still finding time to dance. We danced downstairs for a change of pace a couple weeks ago, but it was so cold outside that the crowd was small and the dance ended early.

The cold weather and weeks without sunshines made it seem like the perfect time to host our first housewarming party. On Saturday, Vivian and I had a couple dozen people over to our new house in Bellevue to celebrate our recent real estate purchase by gorging on loads of hors d'ouerves! Eric brought a game of Things that I completely missed out on while minging upstairs, and a couple people brought bottles of wine that were unfortunately unable to open (where did we put that bottle opener?) We also got the fireplace working, giving Vivian the chance to satisfy her pyromaniac urge while making our chilly basement just a little more cozy.

New Year's Eve in Kansas City

Happy new year, everybody! Vivian and I kicked off the new decade by driving down to Kansas City to visit some old friends from Comic Genesis. I was the best man at Vort and Michelle's wedding, and they invited me and Vivian to spend the evening with them and Fading Aura to ring in the new year. We had dinner together and then toasted with red champagne as the clock struck midnight. The next day, Fading Aura made us some of his legendary waffles for breakfast.

We wound up spending time in four states before arriving home on New Year's Day: Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Nebraska. We had a fairly late Christmas dinner with Vivian's parents, enjoying ham and potato salad before opening presents. Jack and Donna gave each other some new measuring cups, which they used to toast the new year. The next day we came back to enjoy leftovers and watch District 9, which was a much better film than Halo: The Movie, as was originally planned.