a surprise outing

When Steph came home from work Tuesday evening, he managed to shock me so much that I was sure his evil twin was standing before me.

"If I'm not too tired tomorrow, maybe we could go out for dinner."

Now, what you've got to understand is that this, coming from the self-proclaimed "bear who prefers hibernation all year long," whom I have to beg to just come outside for a walk, nevermind meeting up with actual people, was paramount to asking me if I wished to revive the Concorde to go visit my sister for the evening. For a few moments I was too shocked to say anything more than "Really?" and "Sure!"

But after the shock wore off, I realized that there must be some other reason. I remembered vividly an evening approximately two years ago, when Steph came home from work one evening and said, "Tonight is the annual dinner in a nice restaurant for my department - we have to leave in half an hour." Er...

So, not wanting to be caught off guard, I asked if we were going to be meeting other people. Eventually I got the whole story out of him - his colleague was performing a two-man show in a bar in Troyes, and Steph thought we could make an evening out of it. Dinner and a show? In the middle of the (sacred) week? I couldn't believe my luck!

Well, you should know us better than that.

Actually, it turned out fine; we went to a restaurant we've been going to a lot lately in the historic district (and ate the same thing I usually order - I don't know what's come over me! I figure the added bonus of eating out [besides the obvious pleasure of not having to cook] is eating things you don't normally make at home, and I blew it, but it was still good, anyway...) and since the restaurants were mainly empty, we took our sweet time getting to the bar. We had a nice little stroll around the shopping district before getting to our destination, which was packed. Where the hell did all these people come from? They must have been camped there for a while (we obviously had stumbled into the current Troyes hotspot) because there was no sign at all of all these people out in the streets who were now crammed into a tiny bar with a small stage set up at one end. There was nowhere to sit and there was nowhere to stand without being in the way, so after taking a moment to assess the situation, I left it up to Steph if he wanted to stay (I could have gone either way, honestly), and since he decided that his colleague had plenty of support without his, we hit the road.

Not to waste the evening, we swung by the cinema to see if any good movies were playing, and there were - but we had missed all the start times by as little as ten minutes. There wasn't even anyone in the ticket booths, so no dice. All not being totally lost, we thought we'd pop into the bar next door and have a quick drink before driving home, but alas, the bar has turned into a fancy sit-down restaurant. By that time we could finally read the writing on the wall and headed home, where we watched a few episodes of season four of La Maison Blanche (maybe you remember it better as The West Wing), which had arrived while I was out of town.

It was still nice to leave the house during the sacred work week, and I made sure to tell The Bear I thought so.