Great Dinner

Marty's birthday was this past Thursday.  As it turned out, his company was having a "Luau" themed event after work that day, and then he had his guy-night meeting, so he wasn't home to have our usual dinner out birthday night.  Then we had our usual Friday night take-out as none of us were hungry enough to go out for a big special meal.

We decided to go out last night instead, and he chose to go to Red Lobster.  YUM!  I love seafood, but neither of us love seafood prices, so went but restrained ourselves.  Nick would have loved to have had a $30+ crab fest meal, but we kind of nixed that for this time (his birthday is next month) and we all had an under $20 meal apiece.  RL has a 4-course meal option with selections under soup, salad, entree, dessert for just under $18.  Marty ate all of his but was pretty stuffed, Nick, as he has a mild cold effecting appetite, ate about 2/3rds of his, and I ate about half of mine.  Nick and I will enjoy our leftovers for lunch here shortly.    If you've never had their Cheddar Bay biscuits, you can purchase the mix at Costco now.  They are SO good.  We could make a (rather unbalanced) meal out of them alone...and they bring more if you request them.  So we had those, I order the cheesy potato bacon soup (optional was New England clam chowder), a Caesar salad, and my entree was shrimp (6) chili grilled on a stick with a mango-something salsa plus Coconut Shrimp (4) with a pina colada sauce plus rice pilaf plus wonderful whole green beans, and then caramel cheesecake.  For the price, I really hadn't expected that much food on the plate.  I'm drooling now, in anticipation of my leftovers!

We then came home rather than go to the mall as planned, where I was supposed to move into the modern age and get a new smart phone (MY late birthday present) to replace my tiny clam shell pay-as-you-go phone.  I'm perfectly happy keeping my cheap inexpensive phone, but more folks are trying to text me and clam shell models are a pain to text on, the battery barely holds a charge, and my screen is uber-tiny, so though it's now going to cost a whole lot more than a $10 top-up every 45 days, I'll be 'upgrading'.

Tomorrow, later in the day, we'll be heading to one of Marty's friends to enjoy a BBQ dinner.  I get to make potato salad - not a bad deal!  I've never been to their home, but know the wife only a little - we're friends on Facebook but have only met a few times briefly, though she's a quilter too so we may have lots to talk about.

I pray everyone enjoys, and has a safe holiday weekend for what remains of it.