Early Anniversary

April 24th is the anniversary of when Pat and I started dating...seven years ago. We met in college and made things official at a "picnic" his fraternity was hosting (by picnic I mean a big open field with lots of people and about 40 kegs of beer - it was terribly romantic). Its funny to look back to our younger selves - I was 19 and he was 20, just babies! The years have gone by very quickly, but its hard to remember a time when we weren't a "we." He's my best friend and I'm even more obsessed with him now that I was way back then. 

I'm especially obsessed when Pat grows a beard! Love it!

This year, April 24th was Easter. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make all of our family plans work together, and we spent Saturday and Sunday apart. So we started our celebration on Friday night, and it will be resumed here and there until I feel that we've fully celebrated (prepare yourself Pat!). Every year we go away for a weekend to celebrate, but due to holidays, weddings, bridal showers, bachelor and bachelorette parties, our weekend will be postponed for at least a month (we have one free weekend in the next six weeks and I'm not telling anyone when it is so hopefully no other plans come up!). 

Some of our past anniversary excursions:

3 years - Ft. Myers Beach, FL for beach and Red Sox Spring Training

4 years - Bed and Breakfast on the Cape

6 years - Castle Hill Resort in Vermont

 

On Friday night we went to one of our favorite restaurants in Nashua for some amazing sushi, and then went to the pathetic little excuse for a carnival at the mall (i.e. Emily is in heaven). Great way to start our celebrating!

Dinner was at Takumi. They have the best sushi around, and we've come to know the head sushi chef and his two sidekicks. We always sit at the sushi bar and watch them make our food, and always end up ordering more and more. I didn't take pictures of everything we had, but here are a couple of the dishes:

Two pieces of blue fin tuna, two pieces of salmon, a spicy salmon roll, and a crazy roll (shrimp tempura with avocado, spicy mayonnaise, and some other yummy stuff). I used to think that any sushi with spicy mayonnaise or tempura was cheater sushi and that people who ate it weren't true sushi eaters. After trying it, I've changed my mind, because its so delicious! We do limit ourselves to just a little bit of it though, since adding fried food and mayonnaise goes against everything healthy about sushi.

This is a few types of tuna that was mashed up with scallions and served sashimi  style (without rice). The sauces are made there by the head sushi chef.

We also got bowls of miso soup, two additional orders of blue fin tuna, and an order of white snapper. Everything was so delicious. The problem with sushi is that its not very filling, so you feel like you can keep eating it forever (which we would have done if I hadn't been anxious to get to the carnival).

Here's the little carnival - there were about a dozen rides and a handful of stands selling fried dough and other irresistible carnival treats. Pat laughed when he saw how tiny the set up was, but I love carnivals and fairs of any size, and if there's one close by I have to go. We're both reading Water For Elephants right now, so I told Pat to just pretend that we're Jacob and Marlena and to get excited about the carnival. He pointed out that Water For Elephants is based on a circus, not a carnival, and that this barely qualified as that.

Naturally we headed right over to get some fried dough. Half the fun of going to fairs is the food!

Fried goodness! But, as you can see, it was getting really cold out. Even with two shirts, a hoodie sweatshirt, a scarf and a jacket, I was way too cold to stay at the carnival.

Leaving the carnival, Pat with a mouthful of candy.

We decided to stop for a night cap of ice cream (I wasn't too cold to eat ice cream in the warmth of my apartment) and rent a movie. I topped my ice cream with fresh strawberries and peanut butter cups. Perfection!

I think its okay to have about twelve desserts when celebrating an anniversary, what do you think?