Date Night Shenanigans

So when you sing "Silent Night"...that's kind of an oxymoron, I think.


Friday night Dean was coerced into taking me to a Christmas Concert at the Camp Hansen Theatre. The III Marine Expeditionary Force Band plays for dignitaries along the Pacific Rim and they were somehow roped into giving a show for us peons, so of course I wanted to take advantage. I dressed up with my very nicest maternity clothes and a knock-off Hermes scarf, Dean kept on his week-old jeans, and off we headed. It was a lovely evening and the band played very, very well. The Glen Miller jazzy arrangement of Jingle Bells turned out to be my favorite piece of the evening. It inspired me and I told Dean I wanted a guitar for my Christmas present. Dean brought up the fact that I insisted on moving a rather large keyboard with me from NJ to San Diego because I was going to learn to play that, too. As if the two are even remotely related.

After the show, we went out in Ginoza for dinner. Ginoza, which is the small village we live in, is just far enough away from base where your chances of running into English-speaking people become a lot lower. But we’d been to the Italian/Japanese restaurant before and had a fair amount of luck last time in ending up with tasty food, so we decided to go back. Plus I have been taking my Rosetta stone courses, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to trot out a little of my newly-mastered Japanese.

I ordered our drinks in Japanese, no problem. But then there was the issue of the food. The menu was a mix of kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Generally, I can only sound out katakana, and even then it’s hit or miss. I kept picking up the word “tomato,” but in Italian cuisine that is pretty much a given. So, we eeny-meeny-miney-moed and chose an appetizer and two entrées. Somehow, though we are absolutely sure we pointed to completely different menu items, we ended up with the exact same dishes as we had last time we went. The first course was a Caesar salad with prosciutto, just like last time. Then Dean, again, had a pasta dish with more fresh shellfish than pasta on it, and I had pasta with crab in a tomato cream sauce that was, again, served with the empty crab shell perched on top, waving a little claw at me. (Gotta love dead animal carcass humor.) Fortunately, the dishes were just as oishii (delicious) and so the excursion was a definitive success. Still, I am looking forward to next time to see if it happens AGAIN! Maybe all Americans get the same meal.

Sleeping is no longer something I am really able to do with any regularity, so since it was a weekend Dean and I watched our Netflix videos late into the night. “Funny People” had some funny people in it, but no plot or script to speak of. “Accidental Husband” was your typical rom-com—cute, but too formulaic for my taste.

The rest of the weekend we mainly lazed about, did just enough housework to ward off certain infection, and played Wii. Monday, like always, came too fast.