Spakl and Gnome Date Night

Earlier in the week I invited two friends to join gnome and me for dinner, but they had a date night planned. Date? Who does that? Does that mean the guy has to show up with flowers and hold the door and they end the night parked at a clifftop overlooking the city?

Gnome and I hang out a lot (ok more than a lot), but we rarely/never go out with the intent of spending a special evening together. For our one-year anniversary I think we remembered it days later and then went out to dinner a month later using the anniversary as more of an excuse to splurge than as an attempt at a romantic evening.

Anyway, the mention of a date-night spurred me to make plans for us and just us. Otherwise, I surely would've invited others to join us. It wasn't anything totally out of the ordinary, just an excuse to go out.

We started off with dinner at Casa de Luz, which is a must-go-to restaurant in Austin. Organic, macrobiotic, eerily calm waitstaff and customers, set in a gorgeous plant 'n yoga filled complex a few blocks from Barton Springs and Lamar. $12 get you a fixed menu of spectacular and healthy albeit underspiced all-you-can-eat prepared-on-the-spot food.

The dining room is cafeteria style, meaning most tables are large enough to force you to share one with others and make friends.

Leaving the restaurant feeling sedated by hippy calm, we biked over to Alamo South to catch "A Scanner Darkly." Awesome. Woody Harrelson is hilarious and Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr are great too. I love the cartoon-style drama. If you haven't seen "Waking Life," it's a difficult style to explain.. It seems like the cast acted out the film, then animators drew over them and the background.

On the way home, we stopped to walk around the new Second Street District. I felt like I had left Austin and entered a new city. So much has changed since I've last been downtown! The new "district" looks nice and was much more vibrant, but um, everything everything was a bit out of my grad student price range.. (and what's up the dude on the top right of the website deep in thought and hair gel??)