Monstro and I had a date night the other night and stumbled upon an AMAZING restaurant in our neighborhood: Opus Restaurant. If not for the $25 restaurant.com gift certificate I purchased for four bucks, we never would have stopped in, but I'm so glad we did because the drinks were stupendous and the food! Oh, the food! We became the first people to order “the tomahawk”, a 32-ounce bone-in wagyu beef cut that was so rich, it tasted almost like liver (but in a good way). Plus, there was a jazz combo that played the type of jazz that even Monstro likes. And the red velvet cake we had for dessert was delicious (though I think the sugar kept me awake far too late).

OK, time to go to the gym.

When I found out this week I would need to contribute to a month-of-November class birthday party for Lex, I got kind of excited. See, I have this cute animal-face cake pan, and I had a box of banana cake mix in my pantry, so viola! Monkey-face cake! Found the icing directions and today I baked the cake….

And 10 minutes before it was to come out of the oven I thought, “hmmmm, wonder if I should have looked at the allergen info?”

(See, Lex's classroom is tree-nut free, due to some food allergies suffered by his classmates).

Allergen info: Contains wheat, soy and (wait for it) TREE NUTS (pecans).

Shit. Off to the store we went (me, BK, and MFM) to buy a non-nut mix. Of course, the fancy-pants supermarket had only gluten-free mix, and I'll be darned if I'm going to present THAT to my little angel, so I tried Walgreens. They had two boxes of allergen-free yellow-cake mix. I bought them both and raced home, then washed the cake pan, made a yellow-cake monkey-face cake before Lex got home from school (popped it out of the pan about three minutes before he got off the bus), and then made a batch of cupcakes, just in case there's not enough monkey-face cake for everyone.

Nine eggs later and all I need to do is ice everything. Damn straight I'll be posting pictures. 🙂

I continue to go to the gym nearly every day. The scale hasn't budged so much as a pound but I can tell that I'm getting stronger. I had a fit-test analysis done when I began my membership and then another one month later, because I was burning out a little and, again, the scale wasn't budging. Well, if the gym's tape-measure analysis is to be believed, I dropped 5% body fat in a month. Pretty cool.

My smallish goal once I started my gym regimen was to learn how to run on the treadmill without falling off. Now I run on the 'mill nearly every time and I have yet to fall off (though I have accidentally tripped the “emergency stop” button a couple of times, which brings the damn thing to a screeching halt and, yes, is more than a bit of a buzzkill). Typically I run about three miles. Yesterday I started on the rowing machine — rowed 2000 meters in 9 minutes 40 seconds, and then got on the treadmill and ran 2.5 miles. Then I punished myself on a few of the strength machines before saying “screw it” and taking a nice, hot shower.

Today I have a callus and a bit of a rubbing blister from where my wedding bands rubbed against the palm of my left hand. So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty badass, and hardly sore at all!

My BFF, Fringes, is doing the National Blog Posting Month. It's kind of like National Novel Writing Month, but with a lower word count. Basically, bloggers are encouraged to write every day. While it would be spectacular to post 30 blog posts this month, I'm not going to go all crazy with it, but I will encourage myself to check in here more often than usual.

Yesterday was Halloween. The boys got a tremendous haul of candy — even MFM's physical therapist showed up with goody bags for them — and today the sugar hangover was powerful, indeed.

I couldn't sleep last night. This was due to a combination of factors: BK's cold, MFM's trying to wedge her walker into her half-bathroom around midnight, the shocking conclusion to this week's episode of The Walking Dead, and Kim Kardashian's failed marriage. Now, nobody who knows me in real life is surprised by my hatred of all things Kardashian — even the illustrious Bruce Jenner has dropped about 100 notches in my estimation — but this 72-day wedding after the $10-million hoopla makes me violently ill. E Online has been whoring this family out for years and I wonder whether they're a mite pissed off that Kim filed for divorce during the same month that they showed a two-night Kardashian Wedding Spectacular brouhaha. Or maybe they're happy because divorce = drama = good TV = happy advertisers.

The whole thing is sickening. The SF Chronicle posted a story about other celebrity marriages that quickly failed — Carmen Electra and Dennis Rodman's nuptials only lasted 10 days — but you know what? That doesn't make me feel better. Especially when so many people are screaming that same-gender marriage destroys the sanctity of the union. My friends Nicki and Emily have been married for six years and they're doing a lot more to promote the sanctity of wedded bliss than any cheap-ass cat-faced reality “star” did.

I wonder how many people who argue against gay marriage watched both nights of the Kardashian Wedding Spectacular.