OKC

Every couple should have to travel a week or two before they get married. You really find out the different ways of dealing with stress.

What's interesting about Linda and me is -- when we first got together, if we visited a large city, I would get crazy stressed if we got lost. Our solution, eventually, was to let Linda drive in the cities, and for me to try to navigate. Linda used to have the attitude that, if we get lost, we'll we just get to see another part of the city.

Things appear to have completely switched in the last 28 years. Now I'm completely calm if we get lost, and Linda freaks out. She trusts maps, I trust my general directional sense. Better than both is a program on her ipad that gives us specific instructions from wherever we currently are at. We were using my iphone for that (me being the navigator) but that stops working if the radius of the map is too big. The ipad gives us a much bigger, more readable map, so we'll be sure to use that from now on. But I'll be the driver now, and Linda the co-pilot...

My wife hadn't much liked the look of Oklahoma City, so I was pleasantly surprised. It was greener than I expected.

At little detour here -- almost every state we've gone through had nice decorative features in their overpasses and bridges. Art work, or nice colors, or designs. Why doesn't Oregon do this?

So we drove straight from Amarillo to OKC. (Lisa says they call it OKC.) Checked in, and Lisa came by an hour or so later and took us to Toby's new restaurant where he is Executive Chef. It is in the old downtown which is in the midst of being gentrified. It was also just a couple of blocks from where the Thunder were playing, but Toby had a private parking space, heh.

The restaurant looks a long way from being finished, but the soft opening is in a couple of weeks. They were having a tasting later in the evening, and to watch the game, but Linda and I decided we couldn't stay up that late. We wandered around the construction site, and I admit it was pretty damn expensive looking. Garish almost.

Lisa assured us, that it was more or less the "Dallas" look. Subtle it was not. Bright and shiny and golds and silvers and neon and -- pretty over the top, but apparently not for a splashy nightclub.

To our great surprise, the owners let Toby loose for most of Friday (apparently, the restaurant part of the operation is the only part that is on schedule). Toby tends to let his employers work him to death, so finds it hard to get away. We went to see PROMETHEUS, and then later Toby grilled us some steaks at his house. They have four freakin' dogs running around, (2 hounds that are theirs, and two they were babysitting.) Watched the first episode of ROME at their house, by which time Toby was nodding off.

Today, Lisa is going to take us around to the bookstores and comic shops she knows about, which is something Linda and I do on these trips. Toby says he's getting most of Sunday off, too, so we'll see what we do that day.