Date night, Orange Thing and gutters, oh my!

Weirdly, Patrick and I decided to have a date night on Sunday. We were originally going to go for Chinese food, as there is this really good authentic place on Lake City, of all peculiar locations. They have four different menus, if you can believe that. Americanized, native, vegetarian, and some sort of Special Breakfast Menu. I don't know. Anyway, we went and it turned out that Urbanspoon had lied to us. They were not in fact open until 10 on a Sunday. They were only open until 9:30 and the kitchen closed at 9. It was somewhere around 8:45 when we turned up.

So we tried to think of other places to go and remembered Bizzarro, an aptly named very strange looking Italian restaurant in Wallingford. It's another one of those places where the decorators were on speed and LSD at the same time:

The sign says "Nobody is 'fine' with water." How true...

Dinner was excellent. I had the Forest Floor Frenzy, which is in their words "wild mushrooms and walnuts foraged from the darkest woods melded with a cream sherry sauce and our house made pappardelle ribbon pasta." Patrick had the Sugar Snap Pea Carbonara, described as "a traditional blending of fried house cured pancetta, chicken stock, egg and parmesan with sugar snap peas tossed with our hand made linguini pasta."

Both were very tasty. They had some crab-potato fritter thingies as appetizers for that day's special, so we tried those. They were really good. The red pepper aioli that went with the fritters really made it. I think they definitely needed the touch of spice. We ended up downing two half-carafes of house red wine, which was pretty tasty. Date nights really need to be on nights when we have days off the following morning, though... Oh well, wasn't very hungover. And it was worth it.

For an abrupt change of subject, we got the gutters cleaned! Soooo pleased about that. I got up on the roof and threw what appeared to be potting soil out of the gutters for an hour or so while Patrick unscrewed the downspouts and emptied the filth out of them. I doubt whether those gutters have ever been cleaned. If so, at least not for a couple years. It was pretty bad. I found a semi-rotten dog chew bone and two separated halves of a tennis ball up there as well.

While I was up there, I asked Patrick to throw a wet scrubbie up to me, and I cleaned both skylights. You do not realize how dirty those things are until they've been cleaned! I guess it was dirt or algae or something that was on them, but now they're all better. After I got off the roof I swept all the dirt off the deck and we just barely managed to finish everything before it started pouring rain. Guess that was a timely gutter cleaning. The rainy season (read: most of the year) has begun again in earnest, it would appear. Yay!

This picture is actually from a few days ago, not really sure when, but I thought it was terribly cute. The Orange Thing was sacked out in the papasan chair we used to have in our living room (we have since put it up in the loft to make room for the music recording station), and I couldn't resist a picture. He's just so fluffy!

Pictured: cuteness

Weirdly he looks as if he has no tail, but I assure you it exists. It is exceptionally long and fluffy, and is almost permanently waved around looking like a giant crème brulée-colored question mark. Overgrown kitten, indeed.