Had a great time with Eva, John K and Jon last night. Meritage turned out to be an excellent choice - since we liked it, we will credit Eva with the selection.

I had the tapas appetizer (shrimp, sea bass, duck pate and rabbit) with Veal Oscar for an entree. Everything was excellent! No one ventured to try the Mamaliga (a Romanian appetizer), but Eva did have the veal cheeks and Jon had Bacalau Confitado (no I won't tell you what it is). John K had a nice dish of lamb served in three styles.

They had cleared our plates but we were still sitting and enjoying the last of our wine when the waiter came up and slipped a folded card onto the table in front of me. Jon and I both looked a bit askance at it, assuming that they were rushing us by giving us the bill before we'd even gotten around to dessert. I opened it and discovered that they had removed the wine labels from the St. Supery Sauvignon Blanc and the Tintara Shiraz that we had and pasted them onto a card so that we had a reference of the wines we had.

[A nice touch.]

Gary called me during dinner and left a message and then sent me a text that said "CALL ME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!"

[Uh-oh.]

I slipped away and called him back. Apparently the heating system was "shrieking" - making a tremendous racket. I gave him the phone number of Bill, the HVAC guy, and he called to tell him what was going on. When I got home he said that Bill had Gary turn off the boiler that was making the noise and he'd be out the next day.

Bill called me around 9:00 - he was at the house but no one else was. I hopped in a cab and was there in ten minutes. He poked around and decided that it must be a bum relay switch so he went to get a new one. A half hour later he pronounced it fixed and was getting ready to leave, when the system started shrieking again. Bill discovered that the transformer was shot - giving too little power to the system. He went out to get a replacement, came back and had everything done by 10:30.

The cost? Twenty-five bucks.

[And he gave me a ride back to the office!]

Quote du jour:

"After-dinner talk/ Across the walnuts and the wine."

-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1856 - 1900) Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist

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