Weekends

I had a very good weekend this weekend just gone. Friday night I got together with my friends, Vicki and Laura, for a bit of a girls' night out in Scheveningen. We had dinner and drinks and watched the fireworks that they have every Friday night in the summer. The fireworks were great. We had ice cream at two different places. We had a lot of good chats and a lot of laughs. Laura and I stayed the night at Vicki's and then trudged back to Amsterdam the next day.

Saturday evening, O and I had dinner with another couple, the guy being a colleague of O's. They're much older than us, like twice our age, but we share a lot of the same opinions and viewpoints. We had the guy over for dinner a few months ago (when O got locked in our own bathroom) and this dinner was for the occasion of meeting his partner, who was really sweet. She lives California, but was over for a long visit, seeing some of Europe and a lot of Holland. Since she lives just south of San Francisco, we made plans to meet up when we are in SF and maybe go to the Winchester Mystery House together, since she's never been, despite living in the area for some 20 years. We had dinner at the Indonesian restaurant, Indrapura, which was a bit fancy, but very yummy. I hadn't had really good Indonesian like that in awhile and we all left stuffed.

I'm looking forward as well to next weekend. Friday night we're going to dinner at a couple's house in Utrecht, but it's a sort of strange situation in that we really hardly know the couple, heh. They are two Americans we met after the Decemberists show in May and we ended up chatting with them while waiting to see if the band would come out to talk to people. It was fun talking to them and O gave them his email address, so we kept in touch and then planned to get together. It's just weird because in a way we hardly know each other, but we can share stories over dinner.

Saturday is Amsterdam's big gay pride parade on the water and we missed it last year, so O wants to go and hopefully get some good photos this year (and push his site back up as a top hit for searching "gay guys" in Google images). We'll go with the aforementioned Vicki and Laura and, if the weather is better than it is now, it should be a really good time.

Saturday is also O's and my 7th anniversary, but we're not celebrating it til the following weekend when we go to a spa in Haarlem that looks quite nice and has a lot to offer without being horribly expensive. I'm getting a traditional back massage (my first one, I kept chickening out when I had a chance to get one before) and O will try the hydrojet massage, which hits you with hard streams of water. Then we'll probably go somewhere nice for dinner or something.

In non-weekend news, I got the offer from work about my raise and I'm quite happy with it. The raise works out to an increase of 6.8%, which is pretty good. And, something I didn't expect, since I moved up one whole salary scale, I also get an extra day of vacation per year. Sweet. The only problem is that the letter says that this will go into effect from August 1, but it should be from July 1, so my manager is working on getting it changed. If it works out soon enough, I should get a nice paycheck this month.