We stopped in to Victor’s Cuban Resaurant for dinner and to try out their new beer and wine privledges. Very cool. The food is amazing and they only have one type of beer; Hatuey. I dig the label and the beer was very nice light and watered down just like I like my beer.

Kelly & Patrick had never been to this place and it is “summer schedule” as Kelly calls the summer months when you have to be up and moving by 8 in the morning and doing summer type things like going to swimming pools and stuff. Pam and I don’t make it up at 8 but we do what we can to get up and moving and meeting them by noon or so. We hit the road and got to the place and it was freakin’ packed with people. Not what we expected because usually it’s pretty dead and quite but it was a holiday weekend I guess and also their big opening for the year celebration.

We got a bunch of sandwiches and bread and cheese and olives and wine and had ourselves a real picnic. Other than the stampeding horse incident that almost left a little kid dead the day went pretty well. Horse people are strange...it’s not the old west anymore, you don’t need a horse to get from town to town, you’re just showing off. The horses didn’t want to be a round that many people and kids and dogs and a crazy horse got away from a 10 or 12 year old girl that was “holding” it. It all happened in slow motion but that horse came flying through people looking to get the hell out of there and there was a little kid standing right in it’s path out. It’s pure luck that that thing didn’t just squish that kid. I could feel the wind of the thing and the ground shake as it passed. Creepy/

We even had dessert...more wine, grapes, chesse, fruit and killer chocolate cookies from Rustica bakery that melted in the sun and tasted even better that way.

Pretty much just a normal weekday night but we felt like going out so we met Kelly & Patrick for some wine and dinner and dessert at Zander. I was hoping there would be some jazz music playing but there wasn’t. Bummer. That didn’t stop us from drinking these two bottles of wine though.

Embarresed to admit it, but I haven’t seen the new Walker space until now. It was pretty cool...didn’t totally blow me away, but they did a pretty nice job with the place. We weren’t really in gallery mode, we were in gallery shoppe mode, and I was way into looking at books mode. I thought the view of downtown Minneapolis was pretty cool looking out one of the new windows that frames the city nicely. After the Walker we went over to the Weisman Museum to check out their shoppe, which wasn’t nearly as good as the Walker’s, especially the book selection, and the galleries felt oddly dead...sort of depressing actually so we didn’t stay long.

A comfy looking bench in the Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center.

I resisted Pam getting this car at first, but it really is a coolass car.

It’s that time of year again. Fresh strawberries are the way to go...that shit they sell in the stores totally suck. We went out to Bauer Berry Farm with Kelly & Patrick and got ourselves a shitload of strawberries. It really doesn’t take that long to pick them either, and it’s actually kind of fun. The strawberries this year were way bigger than last year, but it was a little harder to find super ripe ones this time. Last year they were real small ones, but super rip and they had a ton of sweet flavor to them.

We hit this place quite a bit for soups and salads and they even have beer and wine and really good desserts. I love the back alley door that isn’t even an entrance but they took extra care to make it look nice with the flowers and stuff. You don’t see that in the suburbs behind businesses. Shit, this looks better than the front of most suburban businesses i’ve seen and certainly has way more character.

Bill Maher is the shit. I used to think he was pretty annoying in his delivery, but now that i’ve gotten more political I could care less about his delivery because what he says is so fucking dead on in line with how I see things, so when Pam got us tickets to see him live I was pretty pumped. It was better than I ever thought it would be...amazing. Got me all charged up about all things political again, which is to say i’m really pissed off again about all things political thanks to our fuckin’ dip shit dumb ass president. Oh ya, the show was at Orchestra Hall...how cool is the ceiling in that place?

We went into downtown St. Paul to eat at Tanpopo for dinner and these two round and soft old school type business salesman dudes were eating there. They were defineately out of place with all the artist and hippy types that usually eat there. I was diggin’ how they both had the super short ties on. I guess they both bought their ties before they grew their stomachs and never bought new ones. “If he’s not getting a new tie, I don’t need to get a new tie.”

Sitting at Java Jacks one morning this little “min-pin” dog came running across the street in front of cars with no idea that at 3 lbs. he didn’t stand a chance against a kids trike let alone a car. Mike and i tried to catch him but that mostly just scared him back out onto the road and in front of another car. That’s the last way i need to start a day is by seeing a dog get pancaked by a car. Mike finally caught the little guy when he went to sniff another dog. Now that we had him we didn’t know what to do with him though because he didn’t have any tags on his collar. Great. A couple walked by after a few minutes and said some dude was driving around looking for a dog but they hadn’t seen him for a while and they didn’t know which direction he went...they couldn’t even tell us what color car the guy was driving (or if he even was a guy) so they weren’t much help. So we just sat there with the little dude and waited...hoping the owner would pass by and see us. I actually started liking the little dude enough to where i kind of hoped the owned wouldn’t come by and i could keep him...he was a really good dog. Of course that’s when the owner called up to Java Jacks to see if anyone had found the dog and they said we had him so he came right up. He looked pretty spooked. “THought the next time I saw him he’d be a pancake in the road.” He was real relieved that we saved him. It was a happy ending. And the dogs name? Spike. You can’t make that shit up.