Playing Catchup

Well, things have slowed down a lot lately since the passage of the holiday season. It got incredibly busy there for a while, with work and vacation and church and illness and all sorts of things. But life is back to it's normal pace now, with Nathan back at work, our slow recovery from sickness, and regular life returning. It's always sort of a letdown for me, because Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year and I always miss it when it's gone. But, it's time to move onward and forward!

Okay, I have to put this story down on paper (or cyberspace, whatever). Nathan and I had finally gotten out on a date this past Friday night, thanks to his dad who came down and watched Eli for us. We decided to go to dinner and headed to Claim Jumper. We were told the wait would be about 45 minutes, so we sat down and waited. After about an hour and a half of waiting, they finally buzzed us and we went to the front counter. A hostess took us all through the restaurant to the back, where we got to a table that wasn't cleaned off. So instead of waiting right there for the busser to clean the table off, she took us all the way back to the front of the restaurant and told us to wait until it was cleaned.
So we're standing right next to the counter, staring at the girl who took us back, who was at this point oblivious to us, talking to all her other hostess friends. We're waiting and waiting, and notice that they're starting to call other people and taking them back. Finally, after waiting for about 15 minutes, Nathan asks, "Is our table ready yet?" and the dumb hostess looks at us like we're crazy for a minute, then realized that she had completely forgotten about us. So she says to the main hostess (who is assigning table to everyone), "Is that table ready?" The main hostess says, "Yeah, but I already sat it." So the dumb one turns to us and says, "It's going to be just a minute." She looked at me and I must have given her some sort of flesh-eating look, because she quickly said, "Actually, we can seat you right now." I was thinking, 'You'd better!'
So we finally get to our table and the waitstaff that was there were pretty nice, but we had another problem with our appetizer, so we didn't get it for 20 minutes after we sat down. That's when Nathan asked for the manager. It was possibly the worst dining experience that I've ever had. Needless to say, the manager was really nice about it, and apparently chewed out the hostess because our waitress came over and asked us what the story was because there was a lot of drama happening. Anyways, we got a free dinner out of it, so that was nice. We spent over 3 hours at the restaurant and didn't have time to see a movie. Oh well. Maybe next time! :)