Week 9 - The Deja Vu Date

This week we revisited our former standard date night.  It was bound to happen sooner or later.  It was John's turn to plan, but in his defense I was the one who suggested it. You see, I had recently been having a serious hankering for China Road, and we still live in a 110+ year old house that still needs things from the hardware store all the time.  So we slipped easily back into our old ways for one night.

We started our dinner, as always, with an order of crab rangoon.  These have been a favorite food of mine since the first time I had them, but I've never eaten them anywhere that come close to as good as China Road's. For dinner, favorite dish at CR is the kung pao beef, but I'm still nursing and Corbin isn't a big fan, so I went for my second favorite - cashew chicken, extra mushrooms.  John had the chef's sizzling hot plate.  As usual the food did not disappoint, the service was wonderful, and since we had the little guy with us several of the servers stopped to see him and catch up with us.  I love this challenge and the places we've been going, but I sure do miss having CR more often. 

Cashew Chicken, extra mushrooms



Chef's Sizzling Hot Plate

After dinner we headed to Lowe's.  As I've said before, our house is over 110 years old.  In that time it has been subjected to several additions and some really shoddy renovations, so something always needs fixed.  This trip was to price the cost of some ceiling fan replacement parts.  The fan in our bedroom is circa 1980.  Some time ago one of the blades broke off.  This left it unbalanced and therefore unusable, so as a quick fix John broke off the opposite one.  A two blade fan wasn't as effective as a four blade fan, but at least it was a fan.  Then a third blade broke off.  John found it impossible to sleep without the fan going, so in desperation he took a blade off the dining room fan and put it on the bedroom fan.  So now the bedroom fan half worked and the dining room fan didn't work at all (unless we were to take another blade off it).  It was really quite a sad situation.  During one of her visits my dear Mother-in-law took one look at the pathetic fan hanging in our bedroom and took us to the store for a new one.  Since we were planning on replacing the hideous paneling on the bedroom ceiling with drywall, we decided to wait to install the new fan until the drywall project was done.  Well, it's been some time now, and the old bedroom fan is still there, half working, and the dining room fan is still short a blade.  With the warmer weather approaching I'd like to get all of the fans in good working order, so we found ourselves looking at blades and blade arms in the fan and lighting aisle at Lowe's.  We decided to just go ahead and install the new fan. Hopefully we will be able to get that done in the near future.  I'm sure this is more information than you ever wanted to know about the ceiling fan situation in our house, but I just thought you should know how desperate we were when we spent yet another date night at the home improvement store. 



The 2-bladed bedroom ceiling fan. 

   Again, I've lost track of the total cost for dinner, but it was somewhere around $40 including tax and tip - and we have a tendency to tip a little more excessively at CR.