Last night at our house...

we ate dinner from Outback Steakhouse on the living room floor by candlelight! Sound romantic? Guess again! Here's what happened...

Eric was supposed to work late yesterday so Chase and I were just planning on eating leftovers or something equally boring. Instead, Eric called and said he'd be home early, so I told Chase that we'd probably go to a restaurant since we didn't have much in the house to eat. When Eric got home, he asked Chase what we were eating for dinner. Chase replied "Outback!" which totally cracked us up because how in the world did he come up with that?! Last time we ate there was in October and it's not like we talk about it much. So, with some hesitation (because when we usually go out to dinner with the kids it's somewhere like Chick-fil-a!), we decided to go!

So we get there, wait for a few minutes (which is actually really rare because our Outback never has a wait... we live in the boondocks), and sit down to order our food. I got a few bites of baby food in Siena when suddenly she starts flipping out. I mean, screaming at the top of her lungs! Nothing was helping... I think she was just plain tired. We tried walking around with her, but that only spread the screaming out all over the restaurant, so after some discussion we decided to ask the waitress to get our meals to go. First we had to inhale our salads and our bloomin' onion, and then we had to try to explain to Chase why we had to leave... not fun. He was so disappointed! Meanwhile, the lights started flickering and we all thought, "UH OH!" because we know what that means... power outage! If you remember the last time I titled a blog post "Last night at our house," then you probably remember that we have power outages way too often. I mean, it's starting to feel like we live in Turkey where the current novel I'm reading takes place ("Snow" by Orhan Pamuk) and power outages happen so often that people hardly notice them. Okay, I know it's not nearly that bad... but let's just say it's nothing out of the ordinary for us!

So, we get our food to go and as we're walking out, we notice that the wait is now an hour and a half!!! This may normal for your local Outback, but at ours, it's unheard of! I don't think I've ever seen more than a 20 minute wait there. I guess everyone in our neighborhood decided not to sit around at home in the dark and they drove to the only restaurant within 5 miles. Anyways, we drove home through the dark streets, past little gangs of teenagers out to make mischief in the dark, and everyone else camped out on their driveway enjoying a driveway beer. When we got home, I put Siena to bed while Chase and Eric lit candles and grabbed flashlights. And the 3 of us sat on the living room floor to enjoy our Outback dinner by candlelight! Well, 2 of us did anyway... Chase spent the next hour asking, "Why the lights out?" "What is power?" "We fix it after dinner?" "Why the refrigerator not work?" "Why we have candles?" "What is that wet stuff is in the candles?" "Why the TV not work?" "What is electricity?"