There's real people on the internet!

Today I got my personal prize for making it to my first weight loss goal: 5% of my body weight. Woot! I actually made it to that goal a little over a week or so ago, but my prize redemption took longer than anticipated.

This is because my prize was going up to Athens, GA to have a real honest-to-goodness grown-up lunch with my bloggy buddy Mir. She has been rockin' my world via the web for a while now, but today I got to see her in person. And she was real! And also very pretty!

So this morning I got all gussied up so that I could impersonate a real honest-to-goodness grown-up and hopefully not embarrass Mir. [Also, I have really fabulous boots with 3.5 inch heels that I find challenging for toddler wrangling and darn if this didn't provide an excellent excuse to wear them!]

Anyway, as I walked Grasshopper into the building so that I could let his teacher know to expect JR for afternoon pick-up today instead of me. On my way out I ran into my friend Renee coming in with her daughter. "Oh my God," she says, "I almost didn't recognize you!" when I grin, she follows that up with, "I've never seen you look like this! Do you have a job interview or something?" Thanks Renee. Thanks a lot. [Clearly I need to step-up my fashion game on a day to day basis.]

I told her that I was performing the role of a Lady Who Lunches today and that I was in costume. This explanation for my lack of ponytail and jeans seemed to put her mind at ease and I continued on my way.

The drive to Athens was really quite pleasant [can you say "me time" boys and girls?], and I never even needed to engage the CD player in my car because the radio stations just kept playing really good stuff, and I was able to crank it as loud as I wanted without concern for tiny eardrums, which made it even better. [Note: it is advisable to also crank the volume on your GPS so that it can actually do it's job of telling you when to turn. Ahem.]

Mir chose a great Italian place for our date, and I was perhaps a bit more excited than I should have been about the fact that there was no white paper or crayons on our table. Did you know that those sorts of restaurants still exist?!? I kind of thought that they all disappeared about two years ago...

Since this was my reward for losing weight, I decided to see how much of it I could gain back in one meal. What? Counter-productive you say? LaLaLaLa, I can't hear you! Besides, I had a Diet Coke and we all know that cancels out the rest of the meal...

I had a very nice Caesar salad [heavy on the Parmesan, mmm] and then lovely, fluffy pillows of purple and white striped goat cheese stuffed ravioli in a sumptuous, sweet pear-wine sauce accented with walnuts and Gorgonzola. I wanted to shrink myself down Honey I Shrunk the Kids-style so that I could roll around on my plate.

Mir and I discussed all sorts of wonderful grown-up things like: our kids [what a shock, right?], and the blogosphere and some of our favorite people in it, as well as football [it is the south], taxes, adoption, jewelery, cooking, decorating, bargain-hunting and finally writing.

I don't remember passing a more pleasant hour and a half in a long time. It really was, as they say, a Fabulous Prize.