Top o' the Mornin' to Ya'

Happy St. Patrick's Day! We're having a good time here in cloudy San Antonio. Hopefully the sun will come out later, like it did yesterday.

Donna and I checked into our hotel and spent the afternoon chatting and people-watching at a perfect table at the restaurant, outside on the Riverwalk. Since D is in tourism, she not only knows all the cool places to stay and eat and go, she knows people at those places, or makes fast friends with them on arrival, which inevitably gets her and her guests top notch service and perks we would not have otherwise gotten.

D had wine and I had two (one too many) margaritas. She ordered oysters and made me try one. I think I had a raw oyster once in Galveston as a teenager, because I remember them telling me to just swallow it as fast as I could so I wouldn't taste it. This one she gave me dressed up with cocktail sauce and on a cracker, which is how "oyster virgins" are supposed to eat them. It was actually pretty good. It's the first thing I've ever had that tasted like ocean. Very fresh and light. I still won't be ordering them for myself anytime soon.

By the time we left, D had befriended our waiter, Sergio, and also the restaurant manager. We told Sergio we would be back after dinner with some friends. He told us to ask for him.

We met Kelly and Barb at the restaurant a few blocks away. D quickly let the staff know she is friends with the chef who owns the restaurant and knows the local chef as well. They buzzed around us all night, chatting it up. Very fun. We didn't know which wine we wanted, so they brought out four for us to try, and we chose two. We had a German onion tart appetizer which was to die for. Then dinner, then dessert, where the chef sent an additional one out for us to try. At the end--- the restaurant comped our appetizer and all the desserts. So nice!

On our way back to the hotel, we were all teasing Donna about how she gets all this special treatment, and how we need to bring her along on all our trips. We get to the restaurant downstairs and it's 10:20 and the hostess tells us they closed at 10. Sergio sees us and tells her he'll take us. He shows us to a table outside, we hang out there until about 11 just having cocktails, and he comes over and tells us they're comping the whole thing. LOL. Now I'm definitely bringing her along on my vacations.

Unfortunately I was just having water at that point, because I was a bit over my typical amount of alcohol for a night out. Kelly started telling me a story, which Barb and Donna already knew, about how several months ago, a woman in five-inch stilettos, talking on a cellphone, had stepped on Kelly's big toe and ripped the nail off. I get queasy hearing about that stuff when I'm completely sober. She was describing it in painstaking detail, the enormous amount of blood covering her sandal and the ground... Donna finally laughed and said, "I think you're making Kathy nauseous."

Nauseous doesn't begin to describe it. Yikes.

So she wrapped up the story in another few minutes, by which time I thought I would have to leave the table. I must have been white as a sheet.

D and I are lounging around in our huge, beautiful hotel room right now. We'll be getting out of our PJs sometime soon, I think. We don't have to be anywhere in particular until the concert tonight. Then Dirty Nelly's, here we come! I'll be the one with the ice water. :)