Date Night in the Dark

I was surprised with a fully-set table and the wonderful smells of dinner ready for me when I got home from work.  Rachel had been craving a bacon/egg/cheese/potato casserole, and made one before she went off to do her afternoon work.  The table was set with candles and some baby-safe sparkling grape juice in some wine glasses!  Rachel was all done up and beautiful as ever. 

The weather was getting really bad outside.  Littlefield was experiencing over 50mph winds that turned our normally blue, sunny sky into a brown and hazy mess!  Driving home from the high school was like the brown version of fog where visibility was about 50 yards and it required headlights.  About 2/3 of the way through our spectacular dinner, the power just went completely out from the crazy gusts of wind.  Luckily, we already had our romantic candles ablaze to light up our room!

We finished up our dinner, finished cleaning the dishes, and decided we should go on about our normal evening...so we folded up multiple loads of laundry!  It was getting very dark outside, so matching some of our socks was becoming very difficult.  We then decided it was time to wander on down to the ol' Alco to peruse the goods!

Alco used to be open until 10pm, but now it is only open until 8pm.  That gave us about 25 minutes to kill.  We did the best we could to see most of the store in that amount of time.  We found the blue painters-tape that we needed to finish up the tree painting for the nursery, and we went on our way.  We even tried to go check out the Bealls department store next door to kill some more time, but it was also closed at 8pm.  Apparently no one is allowed out past 8pm in Littlefield.  Rachel and I decided that it was about time to just go hang out in the dark.

As soon as we got back to our house, we began gathering up many of our candles and flashlights and got our house set-up for the Pre-Edison Era. I thought it would be a good idea to play some good ol' fashioned Gin Rummyhttp://www.ehow.com/how_3998_play-gin-rummy.html...just like my Mother used to play.  Rachel introduced me to Gin awhile back, and I told her how close it was to Gin-Rummy...hence the name...and I wanted to teach her how to play.  Just about the time I started to shuffle the deck....the electricity popped back on.  We decided to just keep on going as planned. 

Everyone that has ever played a game with Rachel knows that she doesn't like to lose.  In the "practice round" I scored an easy 125 points, and Rachel ended with 90 points in the hole!  I don't really think it was the "practice round" until after it was over.  In fact, shortly after tabulating the score Rachel said, "okay...ready to begin?"  We began playing multiple rounds, and of course, as we progressed, Rachel picked up very quickly and started the beating.  Things didn't look good for me...until the last two hands.  I made it up in my mind to try and go out early so that I can catch Rachel with a bunch of cards in her hand.  Of course that didn't work, but luckily, she only had 30 of the 50 points that would have ended the game by the end of the second-to-last hand.  One more hand to go!  Now was that time that my "risk-taking bone" kicked in pretty good, and I started making some tricky decisions that could have been bad, but I pulled out on top.  For a game that was supposed to end at 500 points, I ended with 550 to Rachel's 535!  She couldn't believe it...she still can't.  I better just leave it at that...because I could still end up on the couch.

A perfect ending to a perfect Date Night in the Dark.

Noise Nuisance

We have the sweetest little poodle, Thumper. He is such a great little companion and watch dog. He is always on red-alert, whether it be a door bell ringing on t.v. or our actual doorbell, he is always at the ready. He also tends to bark a lot in our backyard, it is his domain. Most of our neighbors seem to like our sweet little guy. In fact, the ones right next door usually watch him for us whenever we go out of town. However, it turns out we must have a neighbor somewhere on our street who secretly dislikes our dog! When Jeremy came home from work on Friday, there was a note on our door from the police and animal control stating that one of the neighbors had called in a neighborhood nuisance report because our dog was 'barking at all hours of the night'! First of all, dogs bark! Secondly, he doesn't even stay outside at night! So one of our neighbors from across the street saw Jeremy and came over to explain what happened. She told him that when she saw the policeman come over, she talked to him to see what was happening. She filled Jeremy in on all of the details. They hadn't hauled Thumper away, but someone was not happy about his barking! Unfortunately when Jeremy tried to contact the policeman, he was already off for the weekend. So Jeremy decided to go talk to all of the neighbors, on every side of our house. Of course, they all denied calling the cops. But someone did it! We would just like to know so we could maybe solve the problem before getting the police involved. I mean, come on! But this is Littlefield, I'm sure we were big news in the Sunday paper!  So the mystery remains unsolved. When we find out who the culprit is...watch out!