This week has again felt long but there were a lot of fun elements too. I'm looking forward to my week off work—I'm taking a half-day next Friday so that we can celebrate Christmas with my parents/have lunch with them at their place, and then the next Monday through Friday I am off work, for the most part.
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| UNO deep dish pizza, from its Farmington Hills, MI restaurant |
What I've been up to this week:
- Dining out. My boyfriend's mom was visiting us from Indiana this weekend so we did a lot of dining out, which was fun. In addition, on Sat. for lunch I met a friend at Browndog Northville, which is always tasty (I love their ice cream flights). For Saturday dinner, my boyfriend, his mom, and I went to Detroit and had Detroit Shipping Co. for dinner—it's kind of like a food court/dining hall, and I mostly go to Bangkok 96 there for its Chicken Pad Thai roll (think sushi but with tortilla instead of rice as the holder) and mango sticky rice. We also had dumplings from Momocha and my boyfriend got Brussels sprouts and a spicy chicken sandwich from the Caribbean place there; his mom got a chicken and lamb dish from the Halal Mediterranean place, I believe.
On Sunday, I met a friend for lunch at Ardiana's, in Novi, which I haven't been to before; she lives in Ann Arbor so we generally meet up somewhere in between there and Farmington Hills. For dinner, my boyfriend, his mom, and I went to UNO's, at the Delta hotel in Farmington Hills, for some of their delicious deep dish pizzas. Don't forget to use code HOT DISCOUNT for 30% off your order until the end of the year—we got two LARGE pizzas because of that and had plenty of leftovers. On Monday night, my boyfriend had an eye doctor appointment in the Kura Sushi plaza in Novi, so the three of us finally got to try that—I've been to the Troy one, but only once. It's a very fun experience but I will say the Troy one was a bit better than Novi's, at least from this one experience—we had to ask multiple times for water (normally a robot brings it, which is pretty cool though) and also the selection of sushi wasn't as large as Troy's.
And finally, yesterday before a Cirque Christmas show at the Fox, I went to Frita Batidos with my boyfriend, a friend, and her daughter, which is one of my favorites—I used to go to the Ann Arbor one a lot and I love its garlic fries. - 'Twas the Night Before ... at the Fox. Last night, the four of us went to see this at the Fox Theatre, and I highly recommend it—I'm usually a big fan of Cirque du Soleil shows, especially when I go to Vegas, and this was very "Cirque," albeit on a smaller stage in Detroit. It's playing at the Fox until Dec. 26 and you can find more info at my blog post here.
- Fixing my book blog. This week my book blog decided to gift to me ... the sidebar moving to the BOTTOM of the blog. Fun. I am still on Blogger (most bloggers are on Blogger or WordPress) and really need to move to WP at some point, but I've been on Blogger ever since I first started blogging—I started this blog, which originally was Yes/No Films, in January 2010, and I started my book blog in August 2009—and I'm comfortable with it. This has happened before, where the book blog sidebar has moved to the bottom, and generally it's because of some wonky HTML in a recent blog post; however, I unpublished and then republished a few of those and no dice. Eventually I started messing around with the HTML and finally I fixed it ... I used to do HTML for my job, before I transferred to editorial, but it still feels like math to me and I'm not a huge fan.
- Yelp pick-up events. The reason we went to Detroit on Saturday was to pick up some Yelp chocolates at City Bird—I had been to City Bird before, after another Yelp pick-up event actually (at Nest, two doors down) but they had been closing for the night, so we only had about five minutes to browse. This time we had maybe 10-15 minutes (they were again closing in 15 minutes) and I ended up buying a Detroit pin and a Golden Girls birthday card too. They have some neat things there especially Detroit-centric items, and Michigan-centric, and the chocolate (Raaka brand, bean-to-bar) was good. We also stopped at Bon Bon Bon across the street, which is one of my favorite local chocolate places.
Today I need to go to 24th Cheesecakerie in Madison Heights for another Yelp pick-up event, for cheesecake, and my boyfriend and I are also going to Ray's Ice Cream in Royal Oak for a free Yelp Snowman sundae ... so needless to say, I will save the cheesecake for tomorrow, haha ... - Purchasing ALDI greeting cards. For those who know me in-person, they may know that I LOVE greeting cards—if you send me a card, I will most likely keep it for 10+ years (in fact, I have this accordion-shaped box where I keep letters and cards), and I also love sending greeting cards, especially for holidays and birthdays. ALDI sells its greeting cards only a few times a year, mostly around the holiday time, and I lucked out and found a HUGE stash of them at the Orchard Lake Road (Farmington Hills/WB) location this week. The Christmas ones took a bit of a price jump—all its cards used to be $1 each, now they are $1.49—and I bought like six of those and two happy birthday ones. When I was checking out, though, I noticed MORE happy birthday ones at the register—with no time to peruse, since I had to check out—and so the next day, I went back for more of those ... and, weirdly, those ended up being 69 cents each (woot!). If you go to that location, the 69c ones are at the register that is the farthest away from the door, and the Christmas/Happy Halloween/Happy Fall/Thank You cards are in the "Aisle of Shame," as my ALDI Facebook groups have phrased it (because there is so much non-grocery stuff there, and you probably will end up buying more than you need, haha).
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| One of my Bon Bon Bons from Detroit |
