A social weekend

We didn't go to the beach this past weekend. Since we'd been the last 2 weekends in a row, we decided to stay home and connect with some of our friends.

Friday evening we went to Silver Spring to have dinner and hang out with our friends Justine and Liz. Joe & Justine used to work together many years ago, and became good friends and then roommates. Joe actually arranged for Justine and Liz to meet! They lived with us for a little over a year when we moved into our first house together. It really helped us to have that extra money, and it helped them save to buy a house of there own.

We ate dinner at the Austin Grill, which happens to be a favorite of Joe's. The food was good and our waitress was fun too. However, we ate too much and felt absolutely stuffed by the time we rolled out of there. Then we went for a little walk around the new 'Downtown' area of Silver Spring. Lots of restaurants, stores, and a movie theatre are there now, giving Silver Springers and their guests lots of choices. Then we went back to Justine & Liz's house and talked for several hours. I couldn't believe it was midnight before we left!

Saturday we slept in (my vice), did some laundry and a little house cleaning. I also got my hair cut. Then we headed down to Woodbridge to have dinner at our friend Robert & Liz's place. Robert was a roommate of mine in the mid 80s, and Liz was a friend of mine even before that. Robert & Liz first married other people, but years later both became free and finally connected. They got married (to each other) about a year ago.

We'd never been to their place before, and it was almost a bit of deja-vu when we walked into their condo. Their color scheme of dark purple and khaki is the same as our bedroom! I keep paint chips in my wallet so that I can match them to accessories when shopping, so I pulled out the chips and held them up to their walls. We all got a laugh out of that!

We had cocktails and a delicious dinner followed by desert, then watch a movie. Rob & Liz have the biggest flat panel TV I have ever seen in my life: 52 inches of TV hanging on the wall. Oh, and did I mention that its high definition? The picture quality was amazing! We watched "Phantom of the Opera". I didn't expect it to be very good, as often movies made from books and plays seem to take unnecessary 'creative license' and stray from the original plot and details. However, this was almost word for word and scene for scene the way I remember from seeing it on Broadway and from listening to the original soundtrack. We all liked it very much. Even Joe, who always claims not to like Andrew Lloyd-Webber, liked it. As I told him, with "Phantom of the Opera" you have to see it to fully understand and appreciate it. Just listening to the songs without having seen the play or movie isn't enough. At nearly midnight, we headed back home.

Sunday we slept in (again), then headed out for breakfast (brunch?) at Bob & Edith's diner. Unfortunately there was no place to park and we could see a line of people waiting to be seated so we decided to abandon that idea. We made a few stops (read: window-shopped) and then had an early lunch at CiCi's pizza. We picked up an engagement party gift for our friends Michael & Jamie's engagement party this coming Friday. I did some more laundry and then we got ready to meet our friends Gene & Tracy for dinner.

We used to spend a lot of time with Gene & Tracy. They were the ones who got us familiar with the Rehoboth Beach area. We used to go up there off-season and stay in one of Tracy's client's houses and go shopping at the outlets. Joe & I would always try to get a walk on the boardwalk each morning. Gene & Tracy live nearby us, but we haven't seen them in quite a while because Gene decided to go back to school while continuing to work full time. He takes classes over the internet, which actually involve more work than in-person classes because there is no lecturing or class discussion. To learn anything you have to do a lot more reading and writing of papers, so their social schedule has been severely curtailed for a good while. So we were happy to have the chance to hang out with them again. We had dinner at the Lone Star steakhouse, which is a place we never go without them. We got caught up on the happenings in each other's lives and had a very nice visit with them.

It was really fun to hang out with old friends this past weekend. It made me feel really blessed to have such good friends.