Love is in the air…

If you remember things that you have read in the past, (then you are not like me) you might remember that Ian and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary on a plane flying back to the UK with my brother. With the subsequent busy-ness of the weeks following, we never really celebrated or had much time to think about acknowledging our three years as an old married couple.

We shop at Tesco for our groceries. When you shop at Tesco, if you have a clubcard, you get points every time you buy something (you earn a penny for every pound you spend). Those points add up and then you get sent vouchers every three months that you can use in a number of different ways. You can use them in the store with a direct exchange (so if you have GBP 5.00 of vouchers you can use that to buy yourself a large-ish chicken or 5 tubs of Tesco ice cream, for example), or if you go online there are all kind of special offers you can use them for that sometimes make your pounds go further.

One of the special offers is dinner vouchers for Bella Italia, an Italian restaurant that we have in town. If you exchange your Tesco vouchers for Bella Italia vouchers, you get to multiply your pound amount by 4!

So we decided to turn our 5 pound voucher into a 20 pound voucher and go out to Bella Italia for dinner to celebrate our three years together. Basically a free meal. Basically amazing. We are rewarded for buying groceries to feed ourselves.. nice.

So we got all gussied up


and headed out to ‘give it a go’ and see if our vouchers would work as seamlessly as it seemed they would. We asked about it right away because we are skeptical of such things since we didn’t read the fine print last time we went out for dinner.. And lo and behold, it was that easy! Yay! So we enjoyed a yummy meal and NEITHER of us ate chicken!! Here we are in great anticipation of our meal. This is like what our food sees when it looks at us (I was trying to be discrete with the camera :)



We both got seafood. We enjoy plentiful helpings of pasta, shrimpy, saucy goodness, as well as some amazing garlic breadsticks (although, every time I eat bread here, I always miss soft bread.. All the bread we’ve encountered with dinner here is ‘crusty’ if you know what I mean. Does anybody know where I can find soft dinner rolls?? Maybe I just need to make them. Where is that little dough boy when you need him..)



Our waitress was wonderful and dinner came out to a grand total of 28.45 including tip. That is pounds. Which means we just spent nearly $60 to eat at a restaurant similar to the Olive Garden, but without unlimited breadsticks and salad. For two of us. See?? See why we don’t eat out!? :) That’s why we’re grateful that we actually only paid 8.45 of that.. again.. nice.

Anyway. It is significant (and I believe very providential) that we ended up at an Olive Garden-esque restaurant because we had our first date EVER at an Olive Garden (after deciding Texas Roadhouse was far too noisy to have the deep discussions we needed to have about life, meaning, and significance… on the first date) and have gone to an Olive Garden to celebrate each anniversary thus far.

We enjoyed great conversation and walked down toward the beach after our lovely dinner. Unfortunately, I wussed out because it was FREEZING yesterday so we never made it all the way to the beach, but we enjoyed the sea air and sounds nonetheless (we love taking deep breaths outside). We got home to home-made brownies, ice cream, and DOPE!! My first ever time making dope by myself without the rest of my family. Whoa.

No, we are not a family of potheads. We do not have such skeletons in our closets. That is not why our parents chose to live so far back in the woods… We have this recipe for chocolate sauce that actually is probably better than dope if I had to guess, because it’s CHOCOLATE!! Yum! My grandpa made it and passed the recipe on to my dad, who passed it on to me a few weeks ago. And, we’ve always known it as dope. No one knows why. Right? Family? Does anyone know why? Regardless, it’s amazing and not like what you’ll expect it to be like, guaranteed. And I will make it for you if you come visit :)

So we enjoyed our brownies while we browsed a selection of movies to rent FROM THE COMFORT OF OUR COUCH! That’s right folks. The iTunes geniuses have made it so you can rent movies from iTunes and you get to keep them for 24 hrs. That is good stuff. We rented a movie called ‘Wristcutters: A Love Story’ from the comedy section. Sounds weird right?? Well, it did not disappoint. It was weird with a capital W-E-I-R-D!! I’m not sure what to think exactly, but I don’t think I would call it a comedy. I thought it approached suicide (constantly referred to as ‘off-ing yourself’ throughout the movie) too casually and didn’t do a good job at addressing some of the issues it could have addressed in a very thought-provoking way. It felt like the movie wanted to be kind of deep and meaning-of-life-ish, but just didn’t quite make it. I don’t know, maybe that’s what they intended. Maybe that’s why it was in the comedy section. I think this review sums it up well, “It's certainly melancholic, occasionally funny, and ultimately life-affirming. But overall, it feels as if writer-director Goran Dukic dropped a rather promising ball.” It seems like a good ‘let’s watch it and discuss’ movie, but definitely not a ‘let’s sit down and laugh and feel like we just had a really good time at the end’ movie.

So we had a good date night. And are still thankful for our three+ years together :)



p.s. Is it harmful to use makeup that might be almost 7 years old? I mean, because I have this friend.. And she was wondering.. because it still looks normal and works normally.. she wanted to know..


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