My parents safely returned Bug to us not long after I posted earlier. She was overdue for her nap, but ended up not taking one at all. This concerned me, but not too much, considering it would be my parents putting her to bed tonight.
Mister mrtl and I went out to dinner tonight at Johnny Carino's. I ordered a seafood pasta dish that had calamari, shrimp and clams. I know shrimp and clams, but this calamari stuff I'm not so sure about. I've had it before and remembered it was fairly tasteless and was a circular thing. There were circles of tasteless stuff in my pasta, but there were also TENTACLES. These were tentacles with the little sucky suckers on them. I didn't eat the tentacles, although I did test one suckerless end with my teeth and thought it too chewy to go any further. Their presence on my plate reminded me of an episode of some cartoon -- The Simpsons or Futurama, I can't remember -- where there were alien tentacles sticking out of a cooking pot. Good thing I had some wine or I wouldn't have eaten at all; as it was, in my own little way, I felt very Fear Factor eating off the plate with the tentacles.
After dinner we hit South Park, a little bar owned by the same guy that owns Peasant Village, for dessert and a drink. (They only had strawberry Bavarian cream cake, but I ate it anyway and it was nowhere as good as the pineapple.) There were ADULTS there, and we talked to the other ADULTS. This is a big deal for me; I spend my days with a 16-month-old watching things like Maisy's friend Cyril the squirrel wet himself in the sandbox and then throw his soiled pants on the rug and not clean himself up before putting on another pair (what the hell lesson are they trying to teach with that??). I am too far invested in this shit. But I digress.
We learned fairly quickly that certain topics were better left not discussed. While talking about the "locals" -- mind you these ADULTS were locals -- Bush came up. The woman said that she liked him. Change subject... Later we were talking about Austin, where they lived for a while. "Isn't Austin considered the San Francisco of the South?" "There were a lot of gays there, but it's still nice." Change subject... We then stuck to fairly safe topics. She is a teacher. I used to teach. He likes beer. Mister mrtl likes beer. San Angelo has weather. Other places we've lived have weather. We all were there having escaped from our little ones, so of course that came up as well.
The regular bartender wasn't there tonight, the one whom I called "Male Slut" (from his t-shirt) for months before I found out that Ashley is his real name. The stand in, Brian, wasn't so bad, though. We had a nice little side conversation about a mutual fantasy we had as kids, what would today be called a panic room. I wanted a secret panel a la Scoobie Doo in my room that had a slide that would take me into a secret compartment with toys and other cool stuff. That way if a bad man came into my room, I could escape undetected. (I'm realizing now that this strange fascination with home invasion has followed me into adulthood, and I have no clue where it came from.) Stand in bartender guy was totally with me on that.
Best of all, we came home to no drama. Bug was asleep, finally. As it would turn out, she never took a nap today, but when she did go down, she went down hard, passing out coma-like on my mother. And they didn't even try to abduct her.
