Friday night - the way it should be

We've been spending too many Friday nights recently doing chores around the house, doing groceries or generally wasting away prime recreational timeslots in front of the TV watching forgettable programs about nothing in particular.

Not this week.

Fiona took it upon herself to organize a night out - and my favourite kind of night out to boot, dinner and a movie.

The day had been kind of dreary with the fog from the day before transforming itself into showers and a general gray-ness that threatened to put a real damper on the weekend. Fiona and Casey picked me up from work as we had to stop by the garage to pick up the Jazz - it had been in for its yearly MOT inspection. So it was a good start to the weekend to be greeted by a couple of smiling faces and a wagging tail (not Fiona's) instead of tackling the long lines of traffic queuing at the Haudagain roundabout all by my lonesome.

When we got back we took Casey for a nice long walk, past Queen's Gardens and onto Rubislaw Den South. It's one of our favourite activities to walk past the large manor houses which take up the north side of the street and imagine what we could do with a piece of property like that. The dreams always have to start with our lotto numbers coming up, and, I guess more importantly, us playing the lotto.

Dinner was at the Sanddollar Cafe. Words like Sanddollar always get me into a spelling conundrum - is it two consecutive d's? Or does one d do the work for both Sand and Dollar?

Anyway, the cafe is situated on the boulevard above Aberdeen beach and was quite cozy. The food was great. Fiona had lamb wrapped in Parma ham and cabbage with scalloped potatos that was amazing.

Fiona had let me choose the movie, compensation for the last few months where we had made several attempts to go to the movies but not gone at the last minute. It's a lot of pressure to put on a guy. I want to choose something that I would like to see, but if it doesn't pass muster with Fiona then I owe her a choice and that can lead to chick flicks. I threw caution to the wind and went with "Kick-Ass" a comic book movie about a teen who decides to become a super-hero. It's kind of a dark action-comedy and definitely not for everyone - or I would venture to say, most people. I'd equate it to a cross between Superbad and the Kill Bill movies, so if you objected to cartoonish violence and loads of bad language, you should probably stay away. I can't help myself, I loved it. I rank it as perhaps one of the best comic book movies ever made. And it came out here a couple of weeks before the it did in the US as an added bonus.

Post movie we wandered along the seafront, watching huge waves pound the beach into submission. The night was calm and the weather was otherwise quite nice so the pounding surf was an odd juxtaposition.

And to top it all off, we woke up this morning to glorious sunshine. So with everything going sunshine and lollipops for us, I think we should pass on the good fortune. Posted is a picture of Fiona's latest masterpiece. It really is amazing, you can really see the effort that she has put in and that she is continuing to improve her painting skills. You saw it here first. You can see it in the Guggenheim later.

(Actually, faithful readers probably remember the exact date and location of the picture that inspired the painting. It's in the blog archives somewhere ....)