Couldn't have planned it any better

NOTE: I wrote this entry hours ago with paragraph breaks at all the right places. For whatever reason, it will NOT publish any other way than as one big glop of words. I hate that, but who knows when it will be fixed, so the glop will have to do. ACTUAL POST: I babysat a LOT in college. I loved it. I distinctly remember having, at any given time, a few upcoming dates reserved for people who had called me and asked me to babysit. Sometimes they had tickets to an event, sometimes they were just going out to dinner. We are not like those people. Occasionally, we get it together to secure one of our two regular babysitters in advance. This is rare, though. Usually, both the girls are used to getting a call at about 5:30 on a Saturday night from me. "So, uh, this is TOTALLY last minute, but do you by any chance want to babysit in, like, 20 minutes?" Why anyone would give up a free Saturday night to come to our house and hang out with three hooligans is beyond me, but somehow we've convinced them, and this past Saturday night just such a thing occured. Matt and I found ourselves free! Earlier in the day we'd been watching Anthony Bourdain eat Asian food that looked crazy good on The Travel Channel, so we decided to eat at Shogun. If you aren't familiar, it's one of those Japanese places where you sit in front of a grill and watch a guy cook your food while doing all kinds of fancy food-related tricks. We sat with three prom couples and a large family celebrating the olderst daughter's 15th birthday. The prom couples were fun to watch. One of the boys had a fedora with a big red feather in it, and I had to resist the urge to call him Yankee Doodle out loud. The boy directly next to me kept using his chopsticks as drumsticks on the table, and I had to work even harder to resist the urge to snatch them out of his hand and beat him over the head with them. Shogun is a nice restaurant--architecturally beautiful, dim lighting. You know, the kind of place people go for prom. This is why I find it rather odd that when they acknowledge a customer's birthday, they do so by turning on 50 strobe lights all over the ceiling and playing a random pop song at full volume (think Michael Jackson or Katy Perry). When it was the girl at our table's turn, they cranked up some Bieber. The girl's mother stood up and started singing and dancing, totally feeling the groove. It was both amusing and tragic to watch the girl's horror. We had a lovely time and ate ourselves silly. Every time we have a real date, we say that we love it, that it's so important to make sure we keep doing it, that we need to schedule a regular date night. But what's the fun in that?

And the winner is...

MELANIE!! Congratulations, Melanie! You are the winner of a $5 Sonic gift card, to be mailed to you directly.

To ensure a fair contest, I put numbered pieces of paper representing each comment into one of Abby's Hannah Montana cups. Then I interrupted the game of Phase 10 that she and her dad were playing to have Matt (who is still grateful that I didn't write a haiku about him) pick a number without looking. Abby watched and demanded to be the one to pick next time. He pulled the number 7, and the seventh comment belonged to Melanie!

This was really fun. I will have to do it again soon. Sonic appears to be an internationally accepted incentive! Thanks to everyone who entered!