Thursday, Jan. 24

Today is Hubbie's and my thirty-second wedding anniversary. Happy Anniversary to us.

Hubbie was up first this morning, but I followed a few minutes later. He met me at the foot of the stairs with a big hug and kiss, and the greeting..."Happy twenty-four wonderful years!"

"Huh?" I said. "What happened to the other eight years? Was there something wrong with those?"

"Oh!" He laughed, "I meant happy thirty-second...on today, January twenty-four!"

I skipped my exercises this morning in favor of just relaxing for the day. Mother hesitated to come over, thinking she would disturb us on our anniversary day. We assured her we had nothing special planned. So Hubbie accompanied her, and after she presented us with a greeting card, she set to work on a new jigsaw puzzle.

Got a call later in the morning from the water aerobics leader, who said she was sick with a sinus infection. She had a fever and a sick stomach after getting home from aerobics Monday, and went to the doctor. She's on antibiotics now, and of course can't go to the pool tomorrow.

Also, another member is unable to attend tomorrow. That means two of the six or eight of us who have been showing up will not be there tomorrow. And since there is the possibility of slick roads in the morning, due to light freezing rain, I don't think I'll go, either.

After lunch, around 2 p.m., though, Mother insisted on going back home, so I put a helping of New England stew in a container, and wrapped a couple of biscuits for her supper, and Hubbie accompanied her back to her house.

Hubbie and I spent the rest of the afternoon reading our novels on e-readers, and then we changed clothes to go to supper at the local Japanese restaurant. This restaurant is fairly new to our town, but it has been here about a year. We just never got around to visiting it until tonight.

It was fun. We opted for the hibachi dinners, which are prepared at the table...a table that seats eight. We arrived just before 5 p.m., and then had to wait until there were six others seated, four folks...a man, his wife, their child, and another girl...and a middle-aged couple seated to our left, who had come from a town about 45 minutes away.

The meal started with clear soup and a salad. And then a young Japanese man fired up the grill. And I do mean fired up...he lit a flame that reached up to the hood, creating cries of "wow!" from all of us.

We all laughed when the first thing our cook said was, "How y'all tonight?" in a Japanese drawl.

Since there was a young boy at the table, the cook spent a lot of time entertaining him by pretending to squirt things on him, etc. When he'd created a small flame, he brought out a plastic "boy" that appeared to pee on the flame.

When he'd finished scrambling some eggs to be added to rice, he used his spatula to try to fling small pieces of it into each person's mouth. Mine landed on my cheek, while others caught theirs on their shirt fronts or in their hair. Some of it simply missed folks altogether and landed on the floor behind them.

Besides the flames, part of the entertainment was the clinking and tossing of the spatulas. Clinking the spatulas against each other or on the grill created a sort of Japanese musical sound.

Other folks seem to eat a lot faster than we do, because in no time everyone departed, leaving us still sitting there. No sooner had the others gone than a guy came to bus the table. We felt like we needed to hurry, so we quickly put our leftovers into the styrofoam containers provided and got up to leave, too. Hubbie wasn't too happy about this. I don't really think we had to leave right then, but he felt uncomfortable lingering.

Gad, it was cold outside tonight! I was glad to get back to our warm house, where we watched TV for the evening, including a year 2000 movie called "Partners in Crime," starring Rutger Hauer. A twice-divorced police officer lives with his daughter. When a wealthy man is kidnapped, his first ex-wife, who is with the FBI, is called in to help. The police officer botched a kidnapping case earlier, so his reputation is on the line.