Couples Skate

Thursday night, my boss invited my entire team over to dinner at his house. He sent his kids, wife, and dog over to Grandma's and made us a delicious meal of chicken parmesan, bread, multiple appetizers, and a homemade chocolate cake for dessert. Yummy! Apparently I was playing poker at the same time because when I finally got home I still had a chip stack (they were playing 4-8 and making origami at the poker table so it's not hard to see how I was doing so well! Poor confused people) and the hand in front of me was excellent. I managed to make quite a bit of money on that one and then coast into second place, even though I never got another decent hand. Nick managed to finish in the money for the 4th consecutive week with a 3rd place finish. Sergei won it all after taking Seth out (his 5-2 off-suit beat Seth's pocket Ks) and then getting a flush to beat Nick's straight and drain Nick of his chips.

On Friday night, Rob and Katie organized a couples skate at The Depot in downtown Minneapolis. To be perfectly fair, there were plenty of non-couples invited, but all those people said no so it was just couples left over. The Depot is an old train shed that was converted into an ice skating rink. I'd been there once before in college, and I did impress Rob with my ability to drive straight there without any directions. It's a very nice ice rink and the eight of us had a good time skating around in circles for 2.5 hours. Neither Nick nor Rob had ever really ice skated before, but by the end of the night they were catching on and having fun. While we were sitting down waiting for the Zamboni to clear the ice, we decided ice cream was a good idea (it was only about 5 degrees out and sleeting lightly, not to mention we were sitting in a cold ice rink) so after everyone had gotten their fill of skating we headed over to Sebastian Joe's in Uptown, a place highly recommended by Sergei and Janelle and Adam and Alyssa. Again, I'd actually been there once before, but not since college (I used to get around!). It was delicious and I think we sat there for another hour, eating our ice cream and talking and laughing. If you're looking for ice cream, I think it's even better than Coldstone and the prices were a little more reasonable too. Remind me about it if you're visiting us in Minneapolis - it's worth the drive! To finish off the night, we stopped at Dave's house to check for packages on our way back out to the 'burbs. He's off doing his own couple thing with Smeeta in Chicago and didn't want the socks he'd ordered to sit out too long.

And now it's Saturday - Nick is going to help Paul move into his new apartment and I'm going to work on my scrapbook, then we'll reconvene to go to dinner at another friend's house. Sunday is still wide open as to what adventures we'll attempt though! Maybe the ever popular "Karin returns her library books before they're due." Or, of more interest to you, maybe it will be "Karin finally posts those pictures that have been sitting on her camera forever instead of just talking about it." Time will tell :)