all that's past is prologue...

Last night, thanks to my aunt and uncle who took Beatrix to Children's Theatre and then kept her for her FIRST sleepover with cousins Sunni and Soren, we got a well-timed date night! Dinner was kind of unremarkable, actually, a quick bite at Tacos, Nachos and Beer thanks to a Groupon. Not exactly fine dining. Later that night, we ended the evening very differently, with dessert and cocktails at The Strip Club. A delicious "candy bar dessert,"strong cocktails, and one of the best service experiences I have had in a long time. In between, we saw an incredible show, Ordinary Days at Nautilus Music-Theater. Now, I worked at Nautilus for five years, and their opera/new music-theater mission is dear to my heart. Their new space (downstairs from the old space) is really lovely, and adds a jewel-box like theatre space to Lowertown. But the show - WOW! Ordinary Days is written by Adam Gwon, a young wunderkind in music-theater. It's 90 straight minutes of catchy mu...

It's been a hard several weeks with a lot of issues going on. But I knew it had been even harder than I realized when I found myself with a need to be in the kitchen tonight. Creating things usually gets me out of a funk, and cooking/baking/preserving is the ultimate in that for me — I can escape to my own world of thought while doings something beneficial for my family. So, as the time was measured by the passage of shows on MPR, I settled in. I started by pickling (for the first time ever), converting beautiful lemon cucumbers my friend Maggie gave me into 6 jars of golden pickles. As that boiled down, and then soaked in the water bath, I mixed up brownies to use as a base for trifle for a dinner party tomorrow night. Since the oven was already warm and the freezer overly full, I defrosted some bananas and made banana bread (we always toss our bananas in the freezer when they inadvertently become overripe, for this very reason). By the time Patrick got home from taking ...

First day of kindergarten!

So, in trying to be more creative, I've been exploring with more classes. recently, thanks to a Living Social deal, I purchased a Wine and Canvas session.... I picked the session I did because it featured a painting called "Starry Night Over Saint Paul," which reminded me of the night Patrick and I spent at the Covington Inn for our anniversary last year. I found out after I booked that it was the opening weekend for their new space (before now, each night was set up in a restaurant, which I would imagine could get kind of tricky). The space they have now, in St. Anthony, is well set up and has a nice bar and food selection: So you get there, and they set you up with all the stuff. Nothing as intimidating as a blank canvas, right? The crowd was mixed. Predominantly female, though a few couples on dates which looked like fun. A few people on their own like me, but mostly small groups of friends. The trio across from me was a group of nurses on a girls night out...