Happy Anniversary, Baby

Today is our 26th(!) anniversary, but since tomorrow is the opening day of duck season, and Bob is going out tonight for the customary night-before cookout and camp-out, we went out for our anniversary dinner last night. Stephenson's, where we always go, where we've gone for every anniversary since we got married. As we were driving there last night, I said maybe we should go somewhere else, that it's such a long drive.

We always have a good time there, and the food is always good, although last night both the dinner rolls and the apple fritters were doughy, not quite done, and they were "out of" sauteéd chicken livers, and only had fried. We tried to figure out how you could be out of something sauteéd, but have the same thing fried, and concluded that they must either pre-bread the ones for frying, or buy them already breaded. They were okay, but not nearly as good as the sauteéd ones.

So, I don't know. Maybe I'll think of somewhere else to go for my birthday. I'm kind of thinking of Macaroni Grill. That's always a fun meal, too, and maybe it's time to try something different.

I had the smoked chicken, but by the time I drank a Bloody Mary, ate the chicken livers, a salad, a muffin (okay, two--Bob gave me his), half an apple fritter (undone, and I gave Bob the other half), green rice casserole, squash soufflé, and most of my baked potato, I ate about one bite of the chicken. Which is what I intended, what I always do, because I really like the side dishes much more than the entreé (boy, I'm really giving that accented "e" a workout today, aren't I?). I always take the chicken home, and make chicken sandwiches for two or three days afterwards for my lunch.

I knitted Bob a scarf, a "Seaman's Scarf," out of some gray alpaca yarn that I found in my stash. As I've been documenting in Knitting Zen, I knew I wasn't going to have enough yarn, but thought it would be a simple task to get more--but no! Turns out they discontinued that color, and no one had any. So I posted a plea in the weblog for anyone who might have any lying around, and someone wrote and said she had a ball and a half and would be happy to send it to me.

I gratefully responded, and a week or so later, had a package in the mail--from France!

So Bob's scarf is multinational.

He gave me a gorgeous pair of big, pear-shaped citrine earrings, a quartz crystal carved to hold a tealight candle, and a "seeing stone," another quartz crystal polished smooth on one side so you can see into the interior.

In other knitting news, I'm going to make the trek out to Lawrence tomorrow for more sock yarn--I know I'll get it right eventually, and socks are such perfect portable projects. I've got a large Clinique cosmetics bag that I'm using as my sock knitting bag. It holds a couple of balls of sock yarn, the needles, some stitch markers, a tape measure, a small ball of waste yarn, a pad of Post-It notes and a pen, and I can pick it up and carry it anywhere. I thought I might knit on the way to dinner last night, but I ended up driving, and even though Bob drove home, I slept all the way. So no knitting.

At work this week, in attempt to make crisper, cleaner, more professional graphics, I've been playing around with Illustrator. It's slow going, because all I had was the software manual, but Gard found a tutorial book in his office for an earlier version, so I've been working on that today.

My first illustration: