So, I’ve been on “vacation” more or less for a couple of days. There’s been, to be sure, some chores, some parenting, and some last minute holiday shopping (mostly extraneous bits – the actual “shopping” has been done for more than a week). But, in there too, were a couple of nice “dates” out with my loving spouse, making full use of our built-in babysitter.

Last Saturday evening, we spent a few hours at the Virginia Mystery Dinner Playhouse, Richmond branch, enjoying a pretty good meal and an interactive murder mystery comedy show. It was a surprisingly fun experience, given that in my head, I generally associate “dinner theater” with unpleasantness like “outlet malls” and “destination shopping”. We went, largely, because our friend James, aka @thepopeoffrance, is a member of the cast (and only abused us a little bit during the performance: silly hats and “bathroom monitor” responsibilities were involved). If you’ve got a free evening somewhere in Virginia (or at least Richmond, Arlington, Williamsburg or VA Beach), it’s worth the price of admission.

Also, yesterday, we finally got around to having lunch at The Black Sheep in the Carver district of Richmond, just off the campus of VCU. We’d been trying to visit this tiny little place for months, because it’s supposed to be good, and the “Battleship” sandwiches looked really good on that episode of Man vs. Food. We opted for the half-size sandwiches, because the fully-loaded two-footers were just too intimidating (the guys at the table next to us tried to take pictures of theirs, and had to step back into the dining room to get the whole thing in frame on their iphones. It’s a tiny little place, with seating for maybe 35 people, but again, if you want to take a shot at getting a seat (try for off-hours for best results), it’s worth it. The food is AMAZING.

Anyway, I won’t talk about how we combined yesterday’s lunch out with a trip to Costco, because frankly, that’s not terribly romantic, unless you *really* get off on 50# bags of rice and taquito samples.