Christmas might be over but the celebrations continued. My wonderful husband has a birthday three days after Christmas. This year we got to celebrate it thrice. The first time was a casual lunch with some friends right after church on his actual birthday. They so sweetly invited us and some other dear friends over. It was not meant for a birthday celebration, but I brought along a cake and candle, and we sang to M.
The second celebration was later that evening. M and I went on our first outing together (not as a couple yet) to the Houston Nutcracker 15 years ago. M had put together a group of singles for this event and invited me a month earlier on the evening we met. He may not have known it, but I jumped at the chance to get to know him better so I decided to go. Fifteen years ago we went to Birraporetti's before dinner and then the performance. This time M wanted to reenact dinner too so he made a reservation at the restaurant. He warned me when we got there that it had received some poorer reviews recently. And despite the quick service--too quick to demonstrate anything but probably frozen/rewarmed food, the food was indeed rather poor. We joked that everything seemed to have some variation of a bland alfredo sauce on it. Stuffed mushroom caps (stuffed with about 2 pieces of wilted spinach and doused in a tiny bit of cheese and the key ingredient-alfredo-y sauce). Shrimp Scampi (no sign of garlic or butter sauce, but you guessed it! Alfredo sauce on the pasta). Almond crusted tilapia which was not supposed to have any sauce. (again, topped with a piccata sauce that seemed to have alfredo sauce as the base). And for dessert, we ended up with a very uninspired creme brulee (hardly caramelized at all!). Overall, a memory we will leave just that in the future.
After dinner, we walked the short distance (yeah! since wet and bitterly cold!) to the Wortham Center for the Nutcracker. This was far more pleasant. Only it was an unfortunate combination with the lack of sleep in previous nights, the late hour that the performance started, and the beautiful/soothing music emanating through the theater.
We came home and M opened a few more presents.
Our last hurrah for Michael's birthday was a double date with my bro and sis-in-law to go see Unbroken two days later. I was pleasantly surprised at how they kept a bit of the faith-elements. But, also a bit disappointed that they ended the movie as early as they did since they missed about 1/3 of his life covered in the book. This is the time period when Louie Zamperini did a 180 degree change and gave his life unwaveringly to the Lord. Two sentences on screen at the end of the movie were all that was devoted to this. Still a good movie but nowhere near as powerful as the book. Book highly recommended!!!
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