I'm really looking forward to the weekend. I usually am, anyway, but there are some unusually fun things on the schedule for this one.

For Christmas, one of my bigger project clients gave me a gift certificate for a weekend night at this hoopty hotel along with a gift certificate for the fancy restaurant attached to the hotel. We weren't able to use it then, because aside from the usual frantic busy pace of the holidays, we had the adventure of Alan's Assploding Appendix™. It took a long time, far longer than either of us expected, for him to feel truly normal again, and for food to taste pleasant. I didn't want to use such a nice gift when Alan couldn't enjoy it, so we decided to wait and use it for a wedding anniversary celebration.

Our wedding anniversary is actually tomorrow, but instead of me enduring a Friday afternoon commute, flying around trying to pack and re-commute downtown two blocks from the office I just left, probably being wrung out from the workday stresses, we're going to do our hotel adventure on Saturday. Oh, and when we called to arrange the hotel reservation, my client had evidently put in a word because the hotel upgraded us to a suite for free. Spifftastic! We are quite looking forward to it; it should be a lot of fun.

We plan to get there mid-afternoon, explore the hotel, have drinks/snacks and relax before our dinner reservations. I love staying at hotels, flopping on the bed to read the book about all the amenities and features. I so enjoy reading the room service menu even if I know we're dining elsewhere, and reading about everything that's available even if I have no intention of going to the fitness center or the sauna. I've spent some time already looking at the restaurant menu, trying to decide which delicacies I will order - NOM. There are a couple of lounges that have either a DJ or live music (it varies) which we might visit, then a night in our fancy suite and plenty of time the next morning for a delicious breakfast, either back at that restaurant, at one of the cafes in the hotel or maybe even a decadent lolling-about room service breakfast.

Friday will be fun too, though. The new Shrek movie is out in 3-D that day, and it so happens that on our first date, which was the standard dinner-and-a-movie, the movie we saw was Shrek. So that was a nice coincidence and we are planning to see the new one Friday evening. We're also going to dinner at the same restaurant we went to on that first date, Applebee's. I kinda like that we went to an everyday normal restaurant on our first date, instead of him trying to impress me with how much cash he could drop on a meal. We've been to some pretty fancy restaurants since then, though - and another one scheduled for Saturday! Yippee!