With no art, plants, or pillows, it was nice to have familiar friends heading over. Once again, we would be consulting a couple for advice on decor. The couple of counsel this week was Danny and Julie.
Danny and I went to high school together at Roosevelt. He was part of the group of friends with Evan (Week 10) and Aaron (Week 4). He has always been extremely nice and super down to chill. He's laid back and level headed and I'm glad we've kept in touch this long.
He is also generally punctual, so I was praying for another 20 minute late couple entrance as I started cooking about 15 minutes before 7pm, but got no such luck. Right on time, Danny and Julie knocked on our front door. Erica invited them in, and gave them "the tour" as I stayed put in the kitchen and continued to rush through the motions of the meal.
The meal was pasta. Danny had opted with the "we are easy" text in regards to what the meal should be. So I went back to my bread and butter and decided to make something easy. Penne pasta, with spicy Italian sausage, julienne red pepper, diced onion, minced garlic and spices with red sauce. As a side dish, red potatoes with lemon, garlic, butter and oregano. Served with a sparkling rose wine and followed by chocolate ice cream.
We opened the rose in the kitchen and shared a drink while I finished up cooking. It wasn't the ideal process, but honestly, I liked it a lot more than serving cold food. I might try to work on having an appetizer ready at entrance and finishing the meal while the guests sit on the couches and have a cocktail.
The pasta was fantastic but the potatoes were rough, they needed to be softer and they came out of the oven late into the dinner. The sparkling rose went fast and was followed by an excellent bottle of Eastern WA red wine that Danny and Julie brought from a tasting, and it complimented the sausage perfectly. I normally would have directed attention to the mantle piece on the chimney, but Erica had finally convinced me to move it.
With the hideous mantle piece finally out of play, Erica and I had a new issue of taste to offer up to visitors: what should hang above the dinner table nestled against the wall? It is obviously awkward for the two people seated on the bench facing the wall to be staring at a giant blank space. But should it be a picture? A painting? How big, what colors? Etc.
And Danny, leading in with a disclaimer that we would not like his idea initially, offered up an indeed horrible solution. Stickers. I'm pretty sure I shut my brain down before any further explanation of this was expunged. Stickers on the wall has to be way worse than a clay statue of a smaller person reaching a hand into a larger person's pocket. Stickers was bad. But we did a round robin, and I likely offered up the second worse idea, which was to paint an exact replica of the what one would see looking out the windows on the opposite wall. A painting, a Seattle skyline picture, a few other things... then I tossed out the idea of a giant composite picture from each group shot of the 52 Double Dates.
Redemption time for Danny. He suggested 52 small, individual black frames (3"x5" or 4"x6") adding to the wall as the dates occurred. It would be like a dating advent calendar. And a super cool conversation piece. If I can get my wife to agree on this, I love that idea. It's personal and meaningful. And it's not stickers.
Naturally, the conversation turned to the topic of terrorism. It came about while discussing television series we recommend. I noted that it was interesting the largest narrative of our time came about after 9/11, with shows like (more recently) Homeland and (the most popular) 24. We grazed over the conspiracy issues and settled on the fact that the current war of the age is always exploited in all facets of culture but especially Hollywood (for example, all the movies about Vietnam). The Muslim or Middle Easterner as a villain is not a reality that anyone at our dinner table subscribes to, but I do find the hyper-patriotism of shows like that very entertaining.
There's no place to go from terrorism other than Table Topics. So we busted out the best batch and did the thing. Somehow this habit stumbled into the How-We-Met habit. And I delivered a long-winded Alaska story, including added detail that my wife would like to dispute.
More interesting to me (and I'm sure the table) was Danny and Julie's story. Julie was friends with Evan (Week 10) in college at SU. Danny would constantly visit Evan and Cliff in the dorms and thus had known her through friends since 2001. They had been friends for over 8 years before they finally started dating. It was a very feel good saga, almost sitcom-esque, that ended with the first kiss.
It was during this part of the night we discovered our outrageous couple compatibility. Danny and Julie are a No Kids Couple. Not like they just don't have kids yet, like... they aren't planning on it. Erica and I, at this point, do not see children in our future. Danny, logically, does not want to contribute to the overpopulation of a world with an environment being destroyed by humans. In our case, we don't think we could raise a child. Our dog and cat are already receiving subpar attention. I am 100% sure at some point I would try putting my baby in a kennel to leave the house. I just don't know how parenting is done and I am nowhere close to ready for that challenge.
Nonetheless, we are both No Kids Couples. And this is awesome, because it means when we are the weird 50 year-olds with no children, we will be in Cancun together sipping margaritas and spending what would have been a college fund. No hatred directed towards our wonderful friends with beautiful children who are excellent parents. Do your thing! But your thing is not our thing. No Kids Couple bond.
The next evening, I ran into Julie and Danny at Theo's (coming up in Week 33, we are booked THAT far out) birthday party, they applied for a position created by them. Thus, they get it. And that position is Safety Couple. In the event of a DD cancellation, Danny and Julie get first dibs on a 2nd date.
I am still working out in my head what exactly this journey is and how it will unfold. Ideally, there will be 52 different couples, no repeats (although Erica and I definitely want to couple off with Danny and Julie again, as well as all of our visiting couples thus far). I want to add tradition to the mix, which is why I like the pictures idea for wall art. I also want to end the year with some sort of climax or recap. And I even have an idea to remedy the Table Topics monotony.
That chore will be placed on the shoulders of next week's couple: Big Matt and Heidi. Until next time, remember, stay in-touch with everyone and always set aside a day to have fun and enjoy life. Cheers.
No comments:
Post a Comment