Ultraviolet Light

Well, I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner with UV tonight at the Cheesecake Factory in Irvine. We didn't eat cheesecake. It didn't exactly look like a factory either, so we're 0-fer.

The restaurant is in a bajillion acre shopping center with four-billion women's clothing stores. Fortunately there's also a Barnes & Noble, which is where all writers and writer-wannabes (that's me!) gravitate to. So we had a place to meet.

You know, the list of restaurants on the directory was a little tough to go by. Twenty restaurants with names like "Dave & Buster's," or "Joe's," or "Something Inane and Nondescriptive." That's how we picked the Cheesecake Factory. Cuz she had been there. Good bet.

She warned me going in that the menu was huge. She lied. It was freakin' eNORmous. The beautiful part was that they had sections in the menu. The largest section was 10 pages long. It's title? "Specialties."

Brill. How can the bulk of your menu be "Specialties?" Especially when the entrees were all over the dang map?

Oh well, enough of that nonsense.

We had a MARvelous dinner, at least from my point of view. I talked too much and she listened politely and nodded. We actually covered many topics: family, kids, work, writing, blogs, -ers, newsgroups, wine, parties, pinenuts, romance novels, vampires, vampires in romance novels, courtrooms, juries, lawyers, drunks, and mushrooms (NOT those kind.) It's great that two people who had never met face to face before still managed to each tell a story of the last time we puked. That was nice.

If you haven't met this Paula lady, she is a class act, so sweet, gregarious, and funny. Um, just like her blog. Okay.

I was looking forward to going to Vegas, but now I'm really looking forward to going to Vegas. Now I just got to get my wife over that fear of flying.

Oh yeah, we talked about that too.