"Date Day"

Every Friday night, if we don't have other plans, Holly and I have our "date night." We alternate taking turns choosing what we will do each week, and this week it was Holly's turn. Since she had a furlough day today and I rearranged my work schedule to have the day off today too, she got to plan activities for an entire "date day" today!

So we started off for IKEA in the morning. On the way down, Holly showed me the old apartment where she used to live with her cousin:

By the time we got down to IKEA, we were hungry and decided to stop for lunch. I know lunch sounds like a boring subject to read about in a blog, but there is a funny part to this, so bear with me. Holly has been craving Chinese food (which I don't like) for a while, and we came across one of these places right by IKEA:
Fortunately for me, good food was not far away, and there was one of these right next door to Panda Express:

After lunch, we made it over to IKEA. This was my first time ever going to IKEA, which is a favorite place of Holly's.


IKEA turned out to be a pretty neat place. Personally, I think it would be more fun to go shopping there with a specific type of item to be on the lookout for, but today we were (supposedly) just "window shopping" with nothing in particular planned to buy. We did find a couple of little items to pick up by the time we headed to the downstairs part of the store. This is the point where I showed my ignorance about IKEA. Just when I thought we were going to escape while spending less than $5 and mentioned that we were about done, Holly informed me: "Oh, we're not done yet!" How true that was. We wandered around for a while more and picked up some more items (some of which were my idea). I still consider it a victory that we managed to leave with less than $75 worth of merchandise today!

One of the purchases was this neat bookcase, which was marked down to only $25.90 due to damage on the back of it (see pic of the damage below):We wondered if the bookcase would even fit in the car (that's right - we took the car instead of the truck), but we decided to go ahead and buy it and give it a try anyway. After several attempts to get it loaded in, we finally succeeded in doing so. However, unfornately, the only way it would fit was with every seat in the car except the driver's seat folded down! So I proceeded to drive all the way back to Orangevale in rush-hour traffic on I-80 to unload the bookcase myself and then drive back while Holly went back into IKEA to kick back with a soda and do one of her favorite activities - people watching. (By the way, it took nearly an hour to get back home in the traffic! Ugh!)

The rest of the day was quite nice. We ate dinner at Sol Azteca in Folsom, which was a first for both of us. It is good authentic Mexican food and a lot of food for the money.

And what "date day" would be complete without a trip to Costco for some frozen yogurt you ask?! Well, today turned out to be that day, because by the time we made it to Costco to pick up some photos Holly had printed there, we were way too full for any dessert. Oh well, next time!

Despite the crazy fiasco at IKEA, today was a very enjoyable day! We topped it off by watching one of our favorite movies, "Bolt" (which we saw in the theater on our first date together!) and part of "Twister". Thanks for such a fun day, Sweetie!!

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