The Drunk Monkeys

New Year’s has come and gone and now it’s time to start a brand new year.  I have high hopes for 2012 – filled with good times with family, friends and one very special guy.  :)  This year started out the right way, with good drinks, good food, good music, good people watching (OMG), and, oh yes, a reeeeaaaaallllly good kiss at midnight.  Here are the details…

Good drinks – After wandering around the downtown area for a while, we made our way to a nice, somewhat upscale restaurant and managed to find two seats at the bar.  We enjoyed a nice drink and had the bartender take our first official “couple” picture. BTW, we really do look good together. :)

Good food – After enjoying our drinks, we asked for a menu.  They had the normal, limited, fancy-dancy New Year’s menu (complete with jacked-up prices that just about made me fall off my barstool).  We finished our drinks and headed back outside to scope out other options. We passed a little walk-up Mexican restaurant that had bottles of Tapatio on the tables – for anyone who knows me, you know that’s my favorite hot sauce, so naturally, we stopped there.  We enjoyed tacos, guacamole and chips, Tapatio and good company!  Nice and spicy!

Good music – Our mission was to find one of the bands that was advertised to play: The Drunk Monkeys.  Now, we had no idea of who they were or what kind of music they played, but with a name like The Drunk Monkeys, we knew we needed to find out.  We wondered from stage to stage and saw a pretty good Beatles cover band, a very out of tune country band and some random white guy trying to pull off a Cee Lo song (Forget You FAIL).  Finally, we saw a band setting up – The Drunk Monkeys!  I have to say that they were actually one of the better bands that was performing and they played a good selection of music. 

Good people watching – Mullets, hooker shoes, and really (really) bad fashion – oh my!  But the best show was watching the people dance to The Drunk Monkeys (um, the really drunk people dancing to The Drunk Monkeys). These people thought they were so cool… newsflash, when you’re really drunk, you don’t dance as well as you think you do.  But it was funny to see both young and old making complete and utter fools of themselves while the rest of us just stood by and laughed.

Good kiss at midnight – Well, we actually started the midnight kiss well before midnight (gotta warm up, right?) We stopped to watch the ball drop… OK, it was just a cheesy version of a ball drop from a fire truck ladder, but I give ‘em credit for trying.  Oh, and the fireworks were a fairly lame display set off from a parking lot next to the fire truck ladder, but at least they were fireworks (he he).  We continued that midnight kiss well after midnight too (why stop when you’re having fun), and then we heard the funniest line of the night.  Some girl passing us by was yelling into her phone “THAT SUCKED!  I’M NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS CITY AGAIN FOR NEW YEAR’S EVE!”  OK, seriously, what did she really expect??  This ain’t Times Square honey…

So, since then, Swing and I have been spending a lot of time together.  We’ve spent time walking on the beach, enjoying lazy mornings together and having nice romantic dinners.  We do all those cute things that new couples do… we hold hands and kiss all the time – we even have a fun ritual of kissing when we’re stopped at red lights.  We just can’t help it (LOL)… I always wanted to have a relationship where other people would look at us and say “I wish we could be that happy.” Now I’ve got it!  I’ve waited a really long time to be this happy with someone and it feels great.

So, back to enjoying nice romantic dinners… I do a lot of cooking and it turns out that I am actually a pretty good cook (who knew??)  I asked my mom for a Tagine for Christmas because I thought it was cool (if you don’t know, that’s a Moroccan cooking thingy that looks like it has an up-side-down funnel on the top).  I’ve made pork with peppers in it and am going to try a recipe for chicken with chickpeas and mint this weekend.  I’ve been making good use of my Epicurious app on my iPad! 

But I’ve also discovered a fun new thing (OK, not really so new).  I had Groupon when I was back in San Francisco, but when you get deals that are meant for two and you’re just one, it’s not much fun.  I signed up here and we actually used our first Groupon at a nice Italian restaurant last night.  The food was great and the group of people next to us was quite entertaining.  This area has its share of retired people, so we got to listen to an awesome conversation about someone who had a double hernia and now wants to ride a motorcycle again.  It’s a good thing we had drinks! *eye roll*  The next Groupon is for a restaurant on the beach – two breakfast entrees and two mimosas for $17 (sign me up!)  We’re going to try that one this weekend…

And in true fashion, I did add two more pairs of shoes to my collection.  Swing is tall (6’2”) and I’m not, so heels make it so much easier to kiss him.  He’s only seen the tip of the ice burg when it comes to my shoes and so far, so good.  Oh, which new pair will I share with him first… decisions, decisions. ;)