Bookcase, meet cheese plate.

This is a rather terrible photo of the cheese plate that changed my life. Chinua and I were off on a date the other night while the lovely Abby babysat, and we decided to go to a new local restaurant called Silhouette. We'd heard great things and I'd been there once and loved the decor, (that's a fancy word for furniture and pictures on the walls--just kidding, they don't only have pictures on the walls, they have antiques everywhere and poetry written on the ceiling!) but had never eaten there.

And then the cheese plate came. It changed my life. The night became less like a date than a moment for Chinua and I come to a restaurant together to pay homage to its food. The fact that we were together was secondary. We knew our place, which was to murmur to one another about the delight of a kalamata olive when one hasn't had a kalamata olive in three years.

That was a big part of it. I waved my hand over the plate of deliciousness and said, "It's all stuff that isn't here," and you really shouldn't get me wrong, because we are so very blessed to live in Thailand where food is so fresh and plentiful and fruit is everywhere. But eating amazing cheese becomes sublime when you eat it so rarely.

Halfway through the date I drove home to pick Isaac up-- he had woken up and wouldn't go back to sleep for Abby-- and I brought him back to date it up with us. He is always the most delightful baby. He sat between us and smiled and drooled and grabbed handfuls of our shirts, then tried to eat them.

In other news, I bought a bunch of wood the other day because I'm going to build a bookcase. I going to do it despite the fact that I've never built anything before- that's what Youtube is for. . I'll let you know how it goes. So far, just going to buy the wood was like climbing a mountain-- I felt the most incredible resistance because I really want to build this bookcase and I really want it to be nice, but it's all new stuff, and learning is hard. Also describing measurements in Thai is not the easiest. I haven't bought the drill or hardware yet. That's the next part.

I bought teak because it's the only wood to buy, really, and I'm going to paint it. When I told Chinua this, he said, "You're going to paint teak?" I waited a beat or two, and then he laughed, because really, we don't have enough teak going on over here in my house of brown wood? Can't a girl have a little colored wood once in a while? In the future someone will find my bookcase, strip it and refinish it, shaking their head over how anyone could cover up such beautiful wood. How little do they know.