The Majestic Zipper

I  just finished putting away the very last dish form the aforementioned fancy dinner I made for Cas.  It went off without a hitch.  I made Mom's recipe for pork tenderloin and served it on the china I may have mentioned previously.  I wanted it to be special.  I guess I was successful.  Cas was pretty over the moon about the meal.  It's hard to tell early on if a man really likes your food or if he likes you well enough to tolerate what's on the table, but I saw the empty plate.  If that empty plate combined with the consistent praise is to be believed, I knocked it out of the park. 

It was a fruit appetizer and a pair of cosmopolitan martinis followed by pork tenderloin, coated in Italian breadcrumbs and drowned in a whole bunch of red sauce, smothered in mozzarella cheese.  That  rested on some angel hair pasta tossed in olive oil  with a few sliced grape tomatoes and some fresh basil.  There was some garlic bread.  There was red wine.  There was a pretty darn good bread pudding to finish the whole thing off.  I was uncharacteristically pleased with the whole meal.  Usually, when I am faced with the prospect of making food for other people, I am riddled with self doubt.  I wonder if I made the right thing.  I wonder if it was cooked the right way.  I wonder if I could have made a better meal.  This time, I did not wonder.  There is an unfamiliar comfort in this new relationship.  He said it was good, and I believed him.  He even took a bit of the meal home, and I actually thought (and still think) it was because he liked the food.  But seriously- enough about that.  We went somewhere cool after the last bite was chewed. 

I had never been to the Perot museum before.  It reminded me in a lot of ways of trips to the Science Place when I was younger.  This was a pretty cool event.  The whole night was 21 and up, and everyone seemed to be having a great time.  When we arrived, we got a hand stamp.  It's been a good while since I had a stamp on my hand- I felt like I was headed into a night club.  I guess if it didn't say that I was going to an event at a museum, I could claim as much.  It's blurred beyond recognition this morning, so I may just be able to pretend. 

I had a great time at the museum with Cas.  We did the kid-friendly activities.  We generated the energy equivalent of a drop of gasoline with one exhibit and we created our own bird with another.  At the end of our decision making, we were met with a computer-generated image of what turned out to be a pretty unattractive bird.  We also got to name it.  There were two spinners on screen.  I spun the first one to choose an adjective and Cas spun the second one to choose a noun.  Our bird was called the Majestic Zipper.  Love it. 

We walked through other exhibits and played with other toys, but I pretty much had to ask Cas to stop at one point.  He had gotten very intent on doing a good job in a challenge about building with plastic sticks and connectors.  The idea was to build a structure that may withstand an earthquake.  If he had finished the design out to generate a structure of some height, we would have been at that exhibit until the museum personnel came to throw us out. 

As it turned out, we managed to leave of our own volition.  It was an absolute blast to go, and I felt like we had plenty of time to enjoy the place.  The event was themed, and it was supposed to be about superstitions, but we didn't participate in any of the events that were part of that theme.  Mostly, we avoided them because there were long lines.  There must have been people who spent half of the night waiting to get their palms read.  There was even a line to break mirrors then throw salt over your shoulder.  That seemed an odd reason to queue up.  The only long line we joined was for the bar.  That seemed totally reasonable. 

This afternoon, Cas will be with his grandmother celebrating her birthday.  She is somewhere in her nineties.  After that, we have plans to go out with a group of folks and play volleyball.  I haven't played volleyball since high school gym class, so I should be pretty awful.  Still, I will give it a try.