No, not 1923: the numbers 19 and 23: the number of years my wife and I have been married, and together! We met on September 13, 2002 and married a smidge over four years later on September 16, 2006. I always love the fact that we got married so close to the date that we met (I argued we should hold it on the same date, but everyone told me "we're not attending a wedding in the middle of the week" so, eh, the 16th).
For our anniversary, we went to Asheville, North Carolina for the weekend, which we really enjoy due to its wide range of vegan restaurants, great bookstores, nearby hiking, and spectacularly walkable downtown. My wife and I really enjoy places where we can walk everywhere - New Orleans' French Quarter, San Diego's Gaslamp District, Montreal's Old Town, Monterey, even smaller places like Davis, and of course London.
So for the weekend, we walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. We visited all the bookstores and all the art galleries that we could, and looped around downtown maybe a dozen times. Unusually this visit, we chose to try to go hiking - we spent so much time our first five or six trips there in the downtown we rarely got out to do anything else. But we did the Blue Ridge Parkway and Catawba Falls, which has a truly epic staircase tracing its way to the top - 580 steps, which is more than enough to put a crimp in anyone's climb.
No, that's not computer generated, but it did feel like I was in some infinite stairwell in a computer game after a while - it just kept going up and up and up! There's a tall observation tower at roughly the middle, which triggered my latent fear of heights - something I haven't quite debugged; it triggered leaning out over the Hoover Dam but not standing at the Grand Canyon, and leaning over the rail of the observation tower, but not leaning over the rail of the staircase just a few feet away. I think it has something to do with my body detecting "there's a big drop and it might be behind you" - or perhaps I'm just worried I'll lose my hat.
Regardless, the food was the real standout on the weekend. At two of our favorite restaurants - Mountain Madre and Strada - we found there were way more vegan items than were listed on the menu, which enabled us to get some really great things we'd never tried before - vegan nachos at Mountain Madre and vegan bolognese at Strada, both excellent. The Smokin Onion was a great new find - we went there for breakfast before our hike, and liked it so much we went back on our way out of town. The pumpkin spice "cruffin" was superb - yes, decadently sweet, but actually also fluffy and not overpowering.
But the real anniversary dinner was at Plant, one of the best vegan restaurants we've been to - easily the equal of our favorite restaurant, Millennium in Oakland. At Millennium, we often get a high-top table near the front window, but at Plant, you can actually reserve a spot at the "mini-bar" - a two-top counter next to where the drinks are prepared, which feels really intimate even though it's right out in the middle of the restaurant. The waitress remembered us and hooked us up on our anniversary dessert!
Here's to twenty-three more years.
-the Centaur
Okay, I couldn't leave "
... though technically speaking neither are steak, and 
... but either way, all of it was highly delicious!
-the Centaur
So my wife and I were talking about restaurants, and since I'm a foodie, two of my favorite restaurants in the Bay Area happen to be fine dining: 
For a carnivore married to a vegan, it's quite useful to acquire a love of vegan food, so we go to vegan restaurants like Millennium and 
"Um, no," I admitted. "Alexander's is way pricier." (And it is. Some entrees at Alexander's, like the Alexander's Trio of different kinds of 
After a beat, my wife said, "Well, it had better be that expensive, because the animals you eat at Alexander's get fed the kind of food we eat at Millennium."
After a moment, we laughed and agreed that this was probably true - and that we should call up an old carnivorous friend who once told the story of one of his friends who refused to eat vegetables because "that's what food eats."
-the Centaur
Pictured: Appetizers, entree and dessert trio at Millennium, teh yums; Alexander's Trio and a mother-bleeping four-and-a-half-pound wagyu tomahawk chop, which is the largest steak I've heard of at Alexander's, the second largest steak I've ever heard of and a full third bigger than the biggest steak I've ever eaten (and at least twice as big as the largest steak I've eaten without regret). 72 ounces? Even I can't eat that much ... and anyway, I prefer the savory taste of regular beef over the super-richness of wagyu. Actually, just after even writing that, I feel like posting more vegan food to balance it out ... here's a vegan burger and vegan fish and chips at Happy Hooligans:
You're welcome. 
