Saturday the 18th, a co-worker of mine, Jeff, took Molly and I to see “Hot Ice, Cool Sounds w/ Peter Cetera and the Cleveland Pops Orchestra” in Youngstown. He’s known Michael Weiss since Michael was a kid, so he got us free tickets and VIP passes.

Before the show we stopped at Quaker Steak and Lube, which (Molly and I were surprised to find) was not a place where you could eat a steak while waiting for an oil change. I had the wings and pretzels combo. I ordered boneless buffalo and was surprised to find that they don’t bread their boneless wings. When I was doing the Biggest Loser contest, I ordered naked wings at BW3’s and thought they were kind of rubbery and gross. Not so with Quaker Steak’s boneless buffalo wings; they were pretty stinkin’ good. The pretzel part of the combo were three standard SuperPretzel soft pretzels you can prepare in the microwave. Molly ordered soup and said it was ok.

When we first arrived at the arena, we met Michael Weiss and he gave us two programs signed by all the skaters. Molly got a picture taken with him and Jeff did a little catching up with him. Our seats weren’t awesome, there was a camera moving around right in front of us, but they weren’t too bad (especially since they were free). The show was pretty good; they had some fun numbers that I enjoyed. The skaters were Sasha Cohen, Brian Boitano, Jamie Sale & David Pelletier, Shae-Lynn Bourne, Todd Eldredge, Marie-France Dubreuil & Patrice Lauzon, Michael Weiss, Yuka Sato, and Jennifer Robinson. If you’re interested, it’s going to be shown Christmas Day at 3pm on NBC.

After the show, we made our way up to the VIP lounge. It was packed, but I think that’s because Smuckers was a sponsor and their headquarters is in Cleveland. Eventually, we met most of the skaters and Molly got her picture taken with a lot of them. It was a pretty amazing night for her.

Jeff said he will get us tickets and passes for Stars on Ice when it comes around in March. There’s a possibility we will skip the Cleveland show and go see it in Pittsburgh. That way, we wouldn’t be overrun by Smuckers employees and it would be kind of cool to make a weekend trip out of it.

Sunday after church, our small group took some of the widows out for lunch. We went to Moosehead BBQ Grill. I’ve been there a couple times before and had some really good pulled pork bbq, but this time I wanted something that would be less messy given the company. I ordered some seafood pasta, which turned out to be so cheesy and greasy that oil splashed a couple times; so much for a neat and clean meal. It tasted ok the first time around, but the leftovers were kind of gross. I think I’ll stick with meat next time we go there. After lunch, we drove a sweet lady named Helen to her house, since she lives near us. It was nice to get to know some people from church we hadn’t really interacted with before.

Monday night, Molly and I went to see Celtic Thunder. She had scored some tickets from work, so this was our third free show in two weeks (we saw Into The Woods courtesy of SCK the week before). Before the show, I thought it appropriate to eat at an Irish restaurant, so we went to The Harp. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the veggie wrap I remembered them having. We got spicy artichoke dip for an appetizer, but it was more artichoke and less dip. I got a Tomato Basil Panini, which was underwhelming, with onion rings, for which there was no sauce. Molly got a Turkey & Bacon Panini that I think would have been a better choice for me, since I like guacamole and she doesn’t.

After our disappointing dinner, we went to see Celtic Thunder which was not at all disappointing. There were no surprises; they performed all the same songs from the show that we have on DVD. Nevertheless, it was really cool to see them perform.

That was such an exciting weekend that nothing we did this past weekend is really notewrothy.

Molly’s been fighting a bad cough and I ended up bring her home late this morning and working remotely for the rest of the day. We haven’t turned our heat on yet, so it’s been pretty cold and I had to laugh out loud when a co-worker updated his facebook status to “I’m burning up! Someone turn the heat down!” Oh well, we are saving money.