friday night date night

With the smog having settled over the valley like an overturned bowl, I guess I was feeling a little cabin fever-ish, wanting to get out of the apartment for a bit last night.  I suggested a pitcher at the Porcupine and then a take-home pizza from Wasatch Pizza; H thought a trip to Lumpy's was in order instead, as the Porcupine is a smidgen expensive [note: the bill at the end of the night was almost exactly what it would have been on the Porcupine/pizza route, so potaytoes/potahtoes].

Lumpy's on a Friday night in the non-college football season is not nearly as crowded at Lumpy's on a Saturday night when the Utes are playing, we discovered.  We got seats at the bar, Full Suspension pale in bottles, a pizza (for H) and a potpie (for me).  We also got to talk to one of the regulars for quite some time: the loquacious Jason, a multiple-pierced snowboarder/drummer/fisherman/Mormon-hater who never met an F-bomb he didn't like.  Seriously, I thought I was in an episode of Deadwood for a while there: every single sentence had some variation of the F-bomb in it, including the very expressive adjective "f--kinest," as in "that's the f--kinest thing I ever saw." 

Actually, he was a nice guy, quite friendly and full of love for Salt Lake City, despite the Mormons (- he really doesn't like the LDS Church and expressed great surprise that we'd been here for 3+ months and no one had tried to convert us yet.)  He's the first person we've met who thinks the downtown is a great place to go, particularly for live music; he gushed over the fact that you can enjoy all four seasons here and "there's SO much to do!"  And while we made the immediate assumption that he was a 20-something doofus flake, we learned that in fact he was a mid-30s homeowner whose house was just a couple blocks away.  Books, covers, etc., I suppose - this is what we're finding all over the place here: friendly people who just like being here.  It's great.