The Friday Five, 11/29/24: 5 things I've been up to this week

This has been a busy week, and I can't believe December is coming up on Sunday—November went by FAST. We are headed to Indiana today to do Thanksgiving with my husband's family (my in-laws) and yesterday we saw my parents on the day of, as well.

NY Strip steak and sweet potato, at Texas Roadhouse, Novi
NY Strip steak and sweet potato, at Texas Roadhouse, Novi

What I've been up to this week:
  1. Eating out/getting takeout. Last Friday, we went to Tiger Sugar in WB for their Yelp pick-up event, which is always tasty, and grabbed Domino's takeout as well. On Saturday, I met a friend at Saffron, in Farmington Hills, for Indian food, and they ended up having a lunch buffet, which was fun, although it did not have butter chicken or chicken tikka masala (my two favorites); it did have chicken makhani and a paneer dish, though, as well as gulab jamun, rice pudding, and another dessert, for about $16 a person which is pretty reasonable for Indian food.
    On Saturday night, we ended up grabbing "late night" (9pm ... lol) Bucharest Grill shawarma, after the Jim Gaffigan show downtown (more on that below), and on Sunday we went to lunch at Texas Roadhouse before seeing Gladiator 2. Also on Sunday, I had Hungry Howie's takeout with my parents for dinner.
  2. Watching movies. This is not entirely a movie, but we saw the new Jim Gaffigan special on Hulu—I was curious whether it would be a lot of the same jokes we saw Saturday night, but it's like 75% new (to me) stuff and 25% of those. On Sunday, my husband and I saw Gladiator 2 at Emagine Novi, and on Friday I actually saw Gladiator (the first one) for the first time—it's one of my few movie "blind spots," as it came out in 2000 when I was 13. Both were really good but Gladiator was probably 4.5/5 from me, and the sequel was probably 4/5. We did see it in EMAX (their version of IMAX) with the T-Mobile Tuesday deal, though ($5 off per ticket, so $5 each instead of $10 each!) and that was a really nice presentation. 
    On Wednesday, two friends, my husband, and I saw Wicked, which was really good—I'd give it 4.5/5 stars, it would've been 5/5 from me except it was a bit long, but at the same time I'm not sure what I would have cut. However, we almost DIDN'T get to see it, even though I purchased tickets a week ago, in-person at the theater (when I was there for A Real Pain) ... long story short, ALWAYS check the day of or day before to make sure your showtime isn't there. We had booked four tickets for the 5pm open-captioned (subtitles!) showtime, and the day before, I only saw a 5:20pm showtime. I called the theater when it opened on the day of (Wed.) and they had gotten rid of the 5pm showtime, and hadn't notified us, for some reason. Thankfully there were still four seats together for the 5:20pm showtime, so they booked that for us and also threw in some free popcorn and soda coupon for our troubles ... but imagine if we had showed up and didn't have any tickets! I would not have been happy.
    Oh, I forgot: I also saw The Merry Gentlemen on Netflix, which was cute but predictable (with Chad Michael Murray and Britt Robertson).
  3. Watching TV shows. I checked out the JonBenet Ramsey documentary on Netflix this week, and it was pretty interesting—it happened in 1996 and I was 9 years old, and definitely remember a lot of stuff on TV about it. It's wild that it's been almost 30 years now and they still have not identified who the killer was. I also watched my usual Married at First Sight this week, but most other shows didn't have new episodes this week. In addition, I started A Man on the Inside on Netflix, with Ted Danson, and it's really good; I've watched 7 of the 8 episodes so far. 
  4. Seeing Jim Gaffigan at the Fox. I had blogger tickets for this one, which was good because parking was a bit expensive ($27.50 with fees, on Parkwhiz, nearby). I'm a big fan of his—as far as I can recall, I have seen him perform at Caesars Windsor, at the Chicago Theatre, at Meadowbrook, and now this one, but I think I am missing a performance somewhere. His act was rather short, maybe an hour plus like 15 minutes for an opener, but it was a lot of fun, and we had good seats.
  5. Thanksgiving. We headed to my parents' yesterday, in Walled Lake (pretty short drive), and we did our usual traditions: appetizers first, then a break for a movie (in this case, wedding videos from our videographer!), then a bigger meal later. Today we will head to Indiana to do Thanksgiving part two with my husband's family (my new in-laws) on Saturday.
Alley/street near the Fox Theatre, Detroit. lit up for the holidays
Alley/street near the Fox Theatre, Detroit. lit up for the holidays

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