Weekend in Review v.12.01.20

I had been looking forward to this past weekend for ages and it was totally worth the wait. Friday night me, Nat, Ty and Nat’s brother Bro G went indoor rock climbing. It was fun but really humbling experience. Back in the day when I was an adventure tour guide, I used to indoor rock climb every two weeks and I was pretty good at it. Ten years later (ten years!!! Holy fuck, I can’t believe it was that long ago!), I now suck at it. No, wait, not just suck, absolutely fucking blow at it.

I have discovered that I have zero leg or upper body strength regardless of the amount of yoga, fat ladies in deep water and bicep curls I’ve been doing. *sigh* I still hurt. In fact, I hurt more two days later than I did yesterday. I hurt to pull up my pants. I hurt to push the button to dispense wine from the box. That is really bad.

Saturday I had a date with my non-sexual life partner, Puss. We went to the matinee hockey game to see the Canucks slay the Sharks. Afternoon hockey win and a SIGNIFICANT improvement in beer selection at the arena made it even better. If I have to pay $8 for arena beer, you can bet that I’m not dropping that amount of money on a Molson Canadian. Stanley Park Amber Ale? I’m a little more inclined.

For Christmas my boss gave me a $100 gift certificate to The Keg Steakhouse. This seemed like the perfect day to use it. The last time I was given a gift certificate to The Keg, Puss was my date and I couldn’t even dream of bringing anyone else. We started with delightful cocktails, a Bluebery Tea for Puss (orange pekoe tea, Amaretto and Grand Marnier) and a something I can’t remember the name of for me (rum, port, fresh squeezed orange and lemon juices). Our starter was calamari because I can’t say no to squid deep fried with jalapenos and red pepper slices.

For dinner we do what we usually do: order the same thing. *giggle* It’s always by chance that we want the same. It makes sense, we’re non-sexual life partners, lol. Prime rib for Puss, sirloin for me, both with a lobster tail. Hey, we’ve got $100 of free money, we’re not skimping. Our server was amazing. Great conversation, great wine opinions and when we couldn’t make up our minds on wine, he was more than happy to bring us samples to try. We settled on a delicious bottle of malbec. It was a gluttonous meal thanks to the buttered lobster. I believe the line of the dinner/nihgt was, “I know this is butter but it’s really buttery.” (me, many wines in)

For dessert I ordered myself an Irish coffee and Puss and I each had a s’more and a passion fruit infused crème brulée. Know what I only just learned about the Puss? She doesn’t like marshmallows. Weird. I liked the s’more but would have preferred if it had been served hot, she didn’t like it at all. The passion fruit crème brulée had a really great flavour but they did what I can’t fucking stand that SO many mediocre restauratants like this one do, serve the crème brulée cold. Argh, my pet peeve.

Yes, The Keg is a mediocre chain restaurant but my steak was good and both conversation and wine flowed freely. We ate well and by the time we wandered out down the streets of Yaletown, I was stuffed and ready to be mounted (that’s a taxidermy reference, not a sexual one). We didn’t even realise that we had been there for nearly three hours. What next?

We decide to be tourists in our own city and take the aquabus over to the Olympic Village to visit one of our favourite wine stores, Legacy Liquor. After wandering around and eyeing up super expensive wines, we decide to wander over to the Anza for shits and giggles. Neither of us had been in a while so we went to say hello to some familiar faces that we haven’t seen in a while and have a beverage. Ah, the Anza, or Uncle Anza as Puss and I were calling the bar. So many memories there and now we’ve basically abandoned the bar since Puss is no longer the president of the society.

It was a fun night. The next day we were up at a decent hour and wanted to go out for breakfast. We decided on Slickety Jim’s Chat and Chew. Neither of us had been there since the original location burned down, or even to the new location that also had a fire but has re-opened yet again. One thing I’ll give Slickety’s is that I freaking love their jam, it’s more like a compote. This was a sour cherry jam that had giant chunks of cherry with just the right amount of sugar to balance the sour, so good.

I really enjoyed my fun times with Puss. We always have a great time together. So much so that we’re thinking about going to Hawaii again. We were there the winter before last and had such a great adventure. I know I just came from a beach vacation a few months ago but I could definitely go for another one with Puss. Yeah, I like the thought of being on a beach for my birthday.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t feel like going to work and that’s why I want holiday so bad. I’m in a four day collaboration session this week, then back to the office Monday and Tuesday, a hockey game in the corporate box Tuesday night, then I fly out the next morning for a conference from Wednesday to Saturday. *ugh* Going to be so busy in the next little while so I’m going to preemptively apologise for the lack of blogging in the next little while. I’m also going to apologise for the lack of photos in this one. Instead, I leave you with a few things that have made me giggle on the interwebs in the last little while.