The story of my Saturday night

We got back to the hotel with about an hour before Adonis was due to show up. Anne Marie asked me to read her some of The Sentimentalists to see if she found it less impenetrable when read aloud. What I read was nicely written, but I did see her point. We were having a lovely quiet reading time while she was lying down on the bed, and then Bonnie came in from the other room with some ice and tried to move around quietly and failed utterly, so we gave up on the quiet reading time and started mixing drinks again and getting prettified for our close-ups.

Getting photographed was....odd. Adonis was great, and like I said there appeared to be no other guests in residence, so we sprawled ourselves and various camera equipment all over the lobby without disturbing anyone else. Bonnie said she got this idea from a friend of hers who had been surprised on her birthday with a bunch of old friends and a professional photographer, and she said she'd never had any pictures of herself where she looked so natural and great. I doubt that will happen for me with these, but in my head they're fantastic. At one point we went over to the bar and got shots of Goldschlager from a very nice and slightly bemused bartender. Bonnie asked him how old he thought we were which I thought was just asking for trouble. He said thirty-one, which obviously was just asking for a really good tip (which he got - duh). Adonis said he would go back to the other side of the lobby and bring over our stuff and I said "thank-you Adonis" because really, if you ever get the chance in life to say thank-you Adonis, shouldn't you jump all over it?

Then we piled into a cab with a driver who, strangely enough, didn't seem that overjoyed to see us, and went to Signatures. The deal that Anne Marie got from the hotel included vouchers towards a dinner there -- when I heard this I said "great! I've eaten there twice and people only got food poisoning once!" It's a great restaurant, but the time ten of us went for our Christmas party, they were a little overzealous on not overcooking the lobster, and it didn't turn out well for people who, well, ordered the lobster. Happily, everything was cooked to perfection on Saturday night, and our waiter was amazing -- after our fantastic dinner (manchego cheese soufflé, wapiti osso bucco, vanilla parsnip cream, seared tuna, something Anne Marie had with sweetbreads in it which led to the word testicle being said many many times) he gave us a tour of the entire place, including the kitchen and the place where people come for cooking lessons -- according to Gregory, mostly rich Asian women or daughters of Latin American drug lords, because Ottawa is safer and cheaper than paying ransom, and also real chefs with burns and cuts adorning their arms who are actually there to learn. Apparently missing classes is a total no-go, so if you have a broken leg you hobble in and cook, and one woman had really bad hypoglycemia so she would faint once or twice every class and then get up and keep cooking.

It was a fairly long walk back to the hotel, but the weather was perfect and the lights in the trees were gorgeous. We went back to the room and I left the rest of them to cavort and carouse while I eschewed alcohol for the rest of the night and retreated to the bedroom to study for my exam the next day.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like fuck I did.