Saturday Night: Destination Delightful Dunedin

I'm sorry I'm a smidge late posting my weekly blog summarizing the events of the most recent weekend, but I need for you to just be grateful that I'm posting at all.  It's a lot to ask, I know.  But please just try.  If it will make you feel any better, the reason why I'm posting late may become the subject of another post later this week (if I can arrange to sit for an hour at the bounce house place like I'm doing now).  

We celebrated Dez' birthday on Saturday night -- she was turning 29.  Again.  So we got dressed up and headed to dinner out in Delightful Dunedin (Dunedin's city council must be thrilled that their catch phrase has really caught on).  Just Dez, Joe and I were going to dinner and then we were meeting the other usual suspects at Jollimon's.  We wanted to go to dinner somewhere other than Jollimon's this week for a couple of reasons and they both had long hairless tails.

We were about 5 to 10 minutes away from Dunedin when Lauren called us and asked us where we were.  She had just been dropped off by the bus and was standing on a corner near the hospital.  Could we come pick her up?  She was on our way and it would be nice to have another person at dinner, so we swung by her corner and sure enough, there she was standing on the corner of Virginia and Milwaukee  . . . with her massage table (in its convenient 4' x 3' carrying case).  I'm not sure how she thought she was going to make it from that corner to Jollimon's with the massage table in tow, but I'm sure she probably assumed that at some point she would be able to reach one or more of the ten people heading to Jollimon's with us later and they would swing by and pick her up.  The problem for her, of course, is that, had we not been going to dinner earlier, she would have been standing on that corner with her massage table for an hour.  She can thank the rats, I guess.  As it was, she said of the the four police officers that drove past her standing on the corner, only one stopped.  This was their conversation:

Policeman: Do you need help?

Lauren: No.  I just got off the bus and I'm waiting for my friends to pick me up.

Policeman: (eyeing the table) What's that?

Lauren: My massage table.

Policeman: Oh. Are you a massage therapist?

Lauren: Yes.

Policeman: Can I have your card?

I supposed it stands to reason that the best way to get business as a massage therapist is to hang out on street corners with your massage table.  She picked up some business the same way the next afternoon after her massage class (the reason she was carting the table around town all weekend).  She had finished her class and was calling me from the lobby to come pick her up when a random stranger approached her, asked her if she was a massage therapist, and then asked her if she would give him a massage.  So she did.  (I can actually hear my mother swooning at how dangerous this sounds.  But really, being a massage therapist just seems like a risky thing to me in general.  If it were me, I would alert all customers to my taser hanging conveniently from my waist.)

So as it turned out, there were four of us for dinner.  We went to Bon Appetit.  It's right on the Gulf of Mexico in Dunedin -- a little pricier than Dave Ramsey would really approve of when you are in a debt snowball plan, but the food was great.  Joe had lobster pizza -- it was yummy.  The sun set right as we were finishing dinner, so we got some good pictures:

Doesn't it look like I strategically placed that rose in the shot to hide Lauren's cleavage?

It's a shame someone didn't do the same for me:

After dinner, we had itsy bitsy desserts and Robert, our waiter, said Desiree's name in french -- which is "Desiree" but sounds much more lovely than the way we say her name.

And here's a lovely photo of Dez by the water.  

Dez has lost 20 pounds in the last few months.  Doesn't she look great in her new smaller jeans?

When we got to Jollimon's, pretty much everyone else was already there.  We had asked Adam, who had gotten there a good half hour before us to go ahead and order us a pitcher of Sangria and then took bets on whether or not he would actually do it.  I won't say who bet against him, but I will tell you that he did not get us a pitcher of Sangria and Dez had to pay Lauren $5.  In the end it was a good thing that he had not ordered a pitcher of Sangria for us because it was so stifling hot in the area where we were sitting that the Sangria would have been a light pink Capri Sun by the time we got there.

So as usual, a great night with great friends listening to Shane Mead and the Sound a/k/a  . . . Tito.  Tito was awesome.

And we didn't see any rats . . . unless you count that creepy drunk guy who hit on Lauren.