tamarinne

We had a wonderful dinner last night at West Town Tavern.  We started with corn-avocado-cilantro chowder; then we had slow cooked barbequed lamb in a vinegar black sauce over a cabbage/mashed potato mix and a corn cake; pork tenderloin with sauerkraut, maple glazed apples and potatoes, and a homemade pork sausage (that was AMAZING); and for dessert, "banana cream pie" which was really more like a banana brulee and was out of this world.  It's a beautiful restaurant, has a friendly and efficient staff, and everything we ate was delicious.   EDIT: And Raj tells me that the owners/chef of WTT used to own the late, lamented Zinfandel, which was probably one of my favorite restaurants of all time.   Which makes sense, now that I mentally compare what we had last night with the kind of food you used to be able to get at Zinfandel.

Over dinner, we had a good long talk about the shape of our wedding ceremony, what we want to accomplish, and what we feel is important (and what we can do without).  As Rick put it, up until now we'd just been tossing things in that we thought were cool, without knowing what we wanted the event to be.  It was much like choreographing a fight by putting in a lot of cool moves, but without having decided the story of the fight: nifty, but lacking cohesion and meaning.  Now that we know what the story of our ceremony is going to be, I think it's going to make a lot more sense and feel better to both of us.

On the way home, we called the friend we want to be our Celebrant, and he joyfully accepted.  So that's one thing checked off the (semi-enormous) wedding checklist.

We're visiting another venue tonight, and then I think we're going to make a decision about that.  Yay progress!  Yay at least a few venues having open space on such relatively short notice! (And, seriously, I thought people were crazy when they told me 8 months was not enough time to plan a wedding.  However, I am noticing that a lot of venues are booked up already.  That being said, I still think that this should be more than enough time to plan a wedding.  For pete's sake.)

And finally, I think I may be onto something for dealing with insomnia.  Last night (for the fourth night in a row) I was having trouble going to sleep.  I turned on the light and read a chapter of a book on how to deal with insomnia.  It was so boring that I started to drift off.  :)  And after I turned out the light and found myself waking up a little bit, I practiced a few of the techniques I just read about and rapidly fell asleep.  Yay sleep!