Date Night

I love dates.  Dates are delicious.  When I was a kid, one of the cookies that mom would make for the holidays was a date-filled cookie.  It's not a festive looking Christmas cookie, it was just a cookie with date filling plopped on it and a piece of cookie dough placed on top.  Sometimes, mom filled them with a raisin filling, those were yummy, but the date ones were my favorite.

It was a cookie, and y'all know how I feel about cookies.

Dates are the fruit of the date palm, and are a staple food of the Middle East.  An un-ripe date can be anywhere from red to yellow.  Date palms are easy to grow and I am tempted to try to grow a couple.  You need a male tree and a female tree and takes a whopping four to seven years for the female tree to bear fruit.

I guess I am going to stick to getting my dates the easy way - buying them at the store.

If you like dates and you like bacon (who doesn't like bacon?), here is a tasty appetizer to try for the holidays:

Cut slices of bacon so they will wrap just once around a whole date.  Wrap the bacon around the date and secure with a toothpick.  Broil, turning once, until the bacon is crispy.  Delicious.  Remember - it is very, very important to use pitted  dates!

As you can see, I am lacking a key ingredient to the above recipe.

On to another kind of date ...

Last Wednesday was date night for Randy and me.  Which meant nothing other than we were actually going to leave the house when it was light out and get home when it was dark.

I even considered the night we met our neighbors, John and Cynthia, in town for a hamburger at the Back Forty date night.  Left home when it was light, came home when it was dark.

Date night starts to have a whole other meaning after about the fifteenth year of marriage.  Or maybe the fifteenth day.  I can't remember.

First was a leisurely dinner at Colton's.  I say leisurely because it took over thirty minutes for our dinner to be served.  No problem, we weren't in a hurry.  The restaurant was more upset about it than we were and wanted to give us two free desserts for our trouble.  Randy and I declined their kind offer.

After dinner, we headed out to the 6:10pm showing of Harry Potter.  We had almost an hour to spare before the movie started.  

As I said, we left dinner with plenty of time to get to the movie theater.  Mountain Home actually has two movie theaters, both are on Highway 62B, which is the business route of the main highway and it runs straight through town.  We know right where the Sun Valley Cinema 6 is.   Harry Potter was playing at the Carmike Village 5, a theater we had yet to come across in our travels through town.

Even though the address for the Carmike Village 5 is on Highway 62B, it's not.  Suffice it to say that we needed all of the sixty minutes that we had to cruise up and down through town like we were cruising the Renton loop.

Something I never did.  Honest, Dad.

I finally called the theater, had to listen three times to the sweet young lady's voice announcing all five movies, their times and prices to finally get a phone number to call to talk to a real person.

We got there with time to spare, but I had the feeling that if I would have told them that we were going to be late, they would have held off on starting the movie until we arrived.

Had I known that a couple of tablespoons of M & M's and chocolate covered raisins and a small soda to share was going force me to pawn my wedding ring, I would have not only taken Colton's offer of free dessert, but asked for them to-go.

The last movie we saw was in June when Toy Story 3 came out.  Apparently, the third installment on the Twilight trilogy was due to come out the next day.  There were Twilight fans already in line eating their fake cheese nachos, making sure they didn't miss out on the movie.  I don't understand the kind of dedication to something that requires one to sit on the floor where a million, trillion strangers from all walks of life have stood with their shoes having been God only knows where and eat fake food.

I watched the first Twilight movie earlier in the year.  Yes, it came out in 2008, but I am way behind on my Netflix movie queue.  I insist on watching movies in order by date and I rarely allow myself the luxury to move a more recent movie up ahead.  It just doesn't seem fair to the older movies.  The only time that happens is when Randy logs on to Netflix and moves things around.  

Who gave him that password, anyway?

I also have a fixation on the volume control for the TV / Stereo receiver.  The volume has to end in a '0' or a '5'.  I have recently slacked off on this neurotic compulsion, though.  Medication?  Nope.  It is mostly because the hearing and the eyesight aint what they used to be.  As long as I can hear it, I am caring less at what the number is.  As if I could see the number display anyway.

Anyway ~

Twilight isn't a bad movie.  As far-fetched as the plot is, it was entertaining.  Until halfway through the movie when I looked up the plot on Wikipedia.  Reading about how James bites Bella and Edward saves her ruined the rest of the movie for me.  Who'd of thought?   I then read about the second and third installments.  I guess I won't be watching the New Moon or Eclipse movies, either.

Back to Harry Potter ...

It was a good movie.  Rather dark.  As I am told by my in-house Harry Potter expert, this movie is supposed to be dark as it is the beginning of the war between good and evil.  

I was also told, by the above mentioned expert, if I would have finished reading all the Harry Potter books, I would have known that.

Have the BEST day ever!

~ Dorothy