Well, my ear-drums are still reverberating.

Saturday started off fast and quick. My Lovely Wife and I woke up at the baffling time of 7:45 am and were unable to fall back asleep. So, up we got and had ourselves a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs with sauteed mushrooms and cheese. My Lovely Wife complained that there wasn’t enough cheese — as my eggs were drowning in cheese, I took it as another example of her over-powering cheese addiction. However, when she gave up eating her eggs halfway through (meaning, of course, that I got to finish them off) I discovered a definite lack of cheese in her eggs. It seems the Karma Gods of Cheese had chosen to skew the cheese distribution heavily in my favour. Abashed, I did feel.

Then, showering quickly, we decided to head on out to a sample sale of sportwear going on on Almon Street. Driving over, I regaled My Lovely Wife with Gorjus’ “favourite” band LCD Soundsystem. The sample sale however was a bit of a bust for us — great stuff at what I guess were well-discounted prices. However, when the original price for a pair of shorts is over $80, and the heavily-discounted price is $45, the level of discounting loses some of its shine. We left empty-handed… and went instead to spend money at — child-workers of the world, hate me now — Old Navy. Once we had glutted ourselves on cheap pants and shorts, and seeing as we were at the mall already, My Lovely Wife decided more shopping was the order of the day. So… she went from store to store, as I receded further and further into the background.

Finally, she was sated, and we went to Starbucks for a treat before heading home. I picked myself up a peanut-butter square (of great deliciousness) while she ordered a Caramel Macchiato. Waiting in line to pick it up, the call went out from behind the counter, “Tall Caramel Macchiato!” I stepped forward to grab it, but stepped back as someone else swooped in first. “Weird,” I thought, “Same order.” Another call: “Caramel Macchiato!” Yet another person grabbed before us. In the end, five orders were processed before My Lovely Wife’s was made — four for Caramel Macchiatos. The fifth was for an Apple Cider… with caramel. It seems it was a day for caramel.

So off we went home. And then I checked my email. And saw the email that Ramzi sent me on Friday:

“Wanna see Sloan at Reflections?”

For those not in the know, this weekend was Juno Weekend in Halifax. For the first time, the Juno Awards were being held in our fair city and with it came a whole cornucopia of concerts all over the city. And one of the events was Sloan playing at Reflections.

Sloan is a big deal in Halifax. They are hometown boys and were the band that really exploded out of the Halifax music scene of the early 90s. And them playing at Reflections would be pretty awesome — Reflections is not that big a space, so it would be a very intimate club show.

And — though I had been a fan for 11 years — I had never seen Sloan live.

Buuuut… I had told My Lovely Wife that this weekend was for us. We would do stuff together. I had backed out of a tournament to be with her. I was putting off school-work to be with her. If she didn’t want to go… I wasn’t going to go.

So I nonchalantly mentioned it to her — no pressure or anything — to see if she was interested. She was… hesitant. Basically, the most I could get out of her was that I should find out from Ramzi what the details were. Knowing that Ramzi was off at the tournament that I had backed out of, I left a message with him to call me back.

5:30 comes and I’m on my way to the grocery store when the cell phone rang — Ramzi.

The details:

• Sloan is playing tonight.
• His “girlfriend” (more later) Allison would leave him for any one of the members of Sloan in an instant. Taking her would likely mean a reprieve from this occurrence.
• Sloan is one of four bands playing. He doesn’t know what the other ones are — do we care?
• Tickets are $10 (Holy crap!).
• The club recommends that people show up betwen 7:00 and 8:00 to be sure of getting in.

And then what would likely be the deal-breaker with My Lovely Wife:

• Sloan is not on until midnight.

Urk.

I told Ramzi I would check with My Lovely Wife. I called her and let her know the scoop. She told me… she would think about it.

Sigh.

I proceeded to finish the grocery shopping and headed home.

I loaded the grocery bags on the kitchen counter when My Lovely Wife called for me to come upstairs. She was in the bath. She was thinking about it and she wanted to know — on a scale of 1-to-10 — how much I wanted to go. Now, I know that there are some times that the absolute truth is called for… and other times that the “correct” answer is called for. I decided this was the second.

“6.5 out of 10. This is our weekend, and if you don’t want to go, then we are not going to go.”

(She later admitted to me that she knew “6.5 out of 10″ was complete bullshit.)

She said she would think about it some more. Off I went to unpack the rest of the groceries.

Two minutes later, I’m called upstairs again. Then she told me, “If you REALLY want to go… and if you are REALLY nice to me… and if you accept that I will probably complain A LOT… then I say we go.”

Then she repeated it four times, so I knew that she was not just saying it but really MEANT it.

Then I paused for… oh… 0.0052 seconds.

Then I called Ramzi and said, “We’re in.”

(To be continued…)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 9:23 am and is filed under friends, me, music, mylovelywife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.