smacky and bucky

Yesterday evening I fed the animals and headed to Old Town Alexandria around 5. The dinner reservation wasn't until 7, but I hadn't wandered around those neighborhoods in years and decided to take the opportunity to do so. Laura was at a get-together at a knitting shop down the street from her office. On Wednesdays the store has a wine & knit, or whatever it's called, so she was going to meet up with me at dinner. I seemed to recall a record store on a second floor, but when I found the place, it was now an art gallery. Bummer. With quite a bit of time to kill, I walked 15 blocks up the street to a comic shop, and bought my first comics in a year or two. Good timing too, because Frank Cho just released issue # 37 of Liberty Meadows. It's been two years since issue # 36. He was a bit distracted making a lot of money drawing Spider-Man and other assorted titles for Marvel. I also picked up the final issue of JSA (before it's needlessly started over under the title Justice Society of America), a Union Jack trade I didn't know existed, a DC Secret Origins comic with a full-color reprint of the first story of Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown, and Marv Wolfman's novelization of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Wow, that was fun.

I then made my way back toward the restaurant, stopping at Hallmark to get a card for Laura's dad and stepmother. I found a "going away" card that plays Hit the Road Jack when you open it. They laughed, so mission accomplished. The card store had two kittens in a big cage by the register. The woman told me they foster parent kittens from the King St. Shelter, and 26 cats had been adopted this year by people seeing them in her store. Yay! That was nice. I also saw a very cool Star Trek Christmas ornament. It was the transporter, with Scotty, Kirk, and McCoy. It plays the transporter sending and receiving, and flashes lights in sequence. Take a look at it on the Hallmark site here. Scroll down and click on "View Video" under the picture and you can see a clip of it in action. Might need it for my desk at work.

Dinner was at The Warehouse Bar and Grill. I had the seafood sampler, which included lobster tail stuffed with crayfish and crabmeat, shrimp, and scallops. More of a binger than a sampler, really. But since they were moving at the end of the week, we had to linger and get dessert too, so I had pecan pie with vanilla ice cream and a cup of coffee. What a meal...

We got home around 10 and I got a few pages into a comic before having to go to sleep due to the rich seafood and sweet melted butter running through my arteries.

Good times.