22 December 1998: A Nice Dinner

Tuesday, 22 December 1998:

A Nice Dinner

The high point of the day was having dinner with Karen. We exchanged Christmas presents - sort of. I gave her a book for a CD, and she took me out to dinner.

At my suggestion, we went to Pasta per Tutti on the east side of Madison. The previous and only other time I've been there was nearly five years ago, when I had decided to apply for a job at Epic, where I now work. I contacted my friend Charlie, who I'd met in grad school and who had left to work for Epic a year before me, and he somehow convinced Epic to pick up the bill for us to go to dinner as part of the recruitment process. Can't complain about that!

I even remember that it was April 30, 1994, because it was snowing - big, fluffy flakes - and Charlie commented that he hoped it snowed past midnight so it would have actually snowed into May that year. (It did.) Ironically, one of Karen's then-roommates was a waiter there at the time.

Pasta per Tutti is a medium-priced restaurant, which has particularly good pasta. While my other favorite pasta place in town - the Wild Iris Cafe - has been going steadily downhill over the last few years, Pasta per Tutti seems to have maintained its quality. It was Karen's first time there, and she thought it was terrific. I should go there more often.

After dinner, we stopped off so I could pick up the latest APA mailing (and caught the tail end of Dogzilla while we were there), and Karen came over briefly to pick up my tapes of the first season of Babylon 5, which I think she's going to start watching on her time off for the holidays.

All-in-all, a very pleasant evening.

The other notable thing happened at the very start of the day: I drove my usual route to work, taking John Nolen Drive down to the Beltline Highway, which then rockets me to work in about 10 minutes of total transit time. John Nolen runs right past Lake Monona, which this morning was steaming furiously in the morning air.

My guess is that the water was swiftly cooling off since the temperature has dropped so far so quickly. It's been in the 30s and 40s for the last several weeks, and now the temperature has suddenly gone down to zero (which was what the radio announced when I woke up this morning), and the differential caused the lake to steam. It was an eerie sight, a low-lying fog bank carefully restricted to the lake. I've never seen anything like it before.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)