Michelle and I went to our first class in big band era swing-style dance. It's a small class and the instructor recognizes that we are beginners. Nonetheless all those years of step aerobics ruined my ability to move on rhthyms that don't involve 4, 8, 16 or 32 counts. Swing is more like a 6 count beat — slow, slow, fast, fast. It's like I have to reprogram my brain. My feet don't want to move that way. I feel off beat when really I'm on. It'll just take practice.
One of the things Michelle and I looked forward to with this class was the opportunity to go out alone afterwards. Tonight was a real experience! First we went to Charmins on Amherst Street — a nice, small family restaurant that we normally enjoy for dinner. We were seated and served drinks right away. We got their dessert menu and tried to order. They only had a small fraction of what's printed on the menu available. “Sorry, we're out of that...That too... Nope, we're out of that...” We asked to just pay for the drinks and left. We drove further down Amherst Street to the Timeless Diner. There we were seated right away and given menus but didn't see a server for five minutes. There was another table nearby seated before us in similar circumstances. We decided to leave before we got committed to paying for another set of drinks. We drove by Amherst Street Ice Cream House — closed, New England Pies — closed. Finally we went into good ole Blakes Ice Cream here in Milford. They were open and had a wide variety of desserts available — after all, that's what they do best! I had some apple pie with ice cream and Michelle had some cake. We brought mom home a sundae to thank her for watching the kids tonight.
Tomorrow mom flies back to Chicago where the rest of the family is missing her. We so enjoyed having her here. We will miss her. Claire seemed especially sad today at the thought of one of her grandmas leaving.
I picked up the prints from Photographix on the way home. The prints all turned out great, as usual. They do such a great job there. Yes, it costs more than sending them to a local drug store, but every shot looks great. The 4x6s were all from the most recent album. We also had an assortment of 5x7s printed from the last few albums to update several of the frames around the house. Man! The 5x7s were expensive. I think I'll stick to using ShutterFly or dotPhoto for the larger prints. $4 per 5x7 is just way too much. The quality was first rate for everything but the price jump from 35 cents to 4 dollars doesn't seem to scale appropriately. As I write this, Michelle is putting the new 5x7 pictures in frames around the house. She says that although the 8 5x7s cost $32, we don't get them that often and it's still a heck of a lot cheaper than Olan Mills. It's getting late though. Soon I'm going to crash into my pillow...