Date night

(The idea, while very desirable and fun, takes getting used to.  I haven’t had regular dates per se in more than twenty years!)

Hero Woman and I went out tonight after she got off work and I got loose from yet another of my doctors.  (The gastroenterologist.  He’s decided that since my last blood work from the hematologist came back normal, and since he hasn’t been able to find any evidence anyplace of me bleeding into my gut, he’d leave it up to me whether I wanted to do a capsule nano-camera exploration of my small bowel.  I said I didn’t see any great therapeutic benefit to be had from it, and if it was all the same I’d beg off.)  I’d intended we’d go to the Micael Priest poster exhibit at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, but because I can’t read a calendar properly, I failed to realize they aren’t open on Wednesdays—which left us without even a scrap of an agenda or a purpose for the evening.  (I hadn’t had much to begin with.)  This called for improv.

We improvised pretty well, prowling around a nearby Half-Price Books where Hero Woman found a Joe Lansdale title she hadn’t read, and I found a book about Texas courthouse squares and a copy of Texas Trilogy, built around the Steven Fromholz song cycle of the same name.  I was particularly happy to find the Trilogy book; I’d wanted to buy it when it came out (like at the 2002 Texas Book Festival where I could have had it signed by the author, the photographer, and Fromholz himself), but unemployment meant that never happened.  Well, now I have one and perhaps I can track all three of them down gradually (the hardest is gonna be Fromholz, who’s been living up near Stephenville since his stroke and not performing very much).

Once we left the bookstore we decided it was hungry out, and ended up at Azul Tequila, which I like a good deal and where Hero Woman had never gone.  Dinner was indeed good, and I need to go looking for a recipe for the enchiladas pipián I had.  The pumpkinseed sauce intrigues me.

After dinner we spent a few minutes browsing the exotic-pet store next door, where we made the acquaintance of a lively milk snake that’s going to live in a fourth-grade classroom at a south-side elementary school, and an utterly cute baby albino corn snake.  BunRab, they had two or three silly-hair pigs and a mother chinny with some half-grown babies.  I thought of you.

We said goodbye to the exotic fauna and, again being at a loose end, finished up with coffee, cocoa, and talk at Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse.  We finally had to give up because (a) it was SO muggy we felt parboiled, and (b) a thunderstorm was rapidly coming up.  I dropped Hero Woman off at her car and came on home, beating the rain by a few minutes.

We consulted everyone’s calendars and decided we’re going to try having Sundays as a regular date night.  Sounds fantastic by me.

Porcupines are the new dereliction encasement.  Fnord.