This Sunday was our fifth wedding anniversary! And you know what the fifth means: wood. Yes, it is the wood anniversary. Do you know how many jokes I had to stifle? Erectile dysfunction can really kill a "wood" joke.

Wait! Is this on the internet? I meant that I'm as virile as a centaur! Oh, whatever, it's all too easy.

Here are some of the gifts that I lavished on my wife.

--Louisville slugger
--Cocktail muddler
--The wretched Promise Ring CD wood/water
--A seat as assessor of Wood County, West Virginia
--Fragment of the One True Cross
--Cunnilingus session from Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood

Well, not really. We're trying to travel to Europe later this year--good choice! The dollar is set to rebound any day now!--and so we didn't really go nuts for this one. But I did get her Season 1 of Deadwood, which I'm going to say counts.

But we did also have a lovely evening out. We started out our night at the Stumbling Monk, a Capitol Hill tavern that specializes in Belgian beers. It also specializes in the sort of anti-ambience that might be best characterized as a Fuddrucker's that was decorated only with things found at Goodwill. The Stumbling Monk, while having delectable beers, feels exactly like what it is: a former office supply store redecorated by a couple of schlubs who nailed some coasters to the walls and then went out to thrift stores in search of something, anything, that they might put around the place in order to cover up for the peeling paint and lack of running water. A dusty old fixed-gear bicycle presides perplexingly in an alcove that sits atop the primitive bathroom nook; next to it is a confused-looking typewriter. Nearby is one of those old boxy 70s gas heaters that seems all set to blow its payload directly out a window. For "fun," the bar stocks weathered old board games, such as Scruples--the 90s' bowdlerized answer to "I Never"--and a Scrabble game that is missing all the vowels. Needless to say, we love this place.

After that, we headed out to dinner at another Capitol Hill joint called Crave. "Two?" asked the unstoppably cheerful waitress. Her teeth were like Velamints. "We actually have reservations," said the wife. We all looked at the dining room, which had two other occupied tables. I felt sort of dumb. "Okay!" the waitress replied, and unnecessarily but enthusiastically scratched our name from the reservation tablet. She was sort of like Stalin, except that instead of executing us or forcing us into a gulag, she was going to bring us dinner.

We took our seats and ordered some wine and cheese, all of which were magnificent, and we took to idly watching the street life petri-dishing itself outside our window. Crave stands above a small theater space called CHAC, which stands for Capitol Hill Arts . . . Company? Collective? Consortium? Cocksuckers? I don't care. Anyway, there was obviously something going on down there on this Sunday evening, and whatever that something was, it involved the oddest mix of audience members I've seen in a while. There was a large constituent of the ink-and-skateboard crowd, wearing aggressively ugly clothing and fierce expressions; what was interesting was that for such an obviously anti-normals crowd, they sure did like to hug a lot. You don't often see a guy with full tattoo sleeves fist-pound another dude with a scrotum stapled to his forehead and then warmly hug each other. You also don't often see these sorts of fellows hanging out at theater venues with their mothers, but that's the only way I can explain the startling numbers of middle-aged women meekly wandering down into CHAC, clutching their purses, to witness what I could only figure was a reunion concert of the Crucifucks. The whole thing was deeply strange, but interesting to watch. It was, for all the cognitive dissonance, kind of a sweet scene.

On a cigarette break, I examined a tattered poster advertising what was going on that night: it was a night of dance performances. Well, okay. I returned back to Crave to deal with the rest of dinner and the pleasant waitress and her glinting, unsheathed teeth.

Which was happily fantastic. The wife had some gorgeous lamb chops--they were all out of braised puppies--and I had a "thick-cut" pork chop, which seemed to stretch the definition of "thick" to include "absurd." It had some glaze on it that included, ludicrously, sarsaparilla. I kept waiting for Yosemite Sam to appear tableside and ask me how my gol-durned hunk o' dang hawg was.

And naturally we ended the night at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named, where, as usual, we were treated as royalty. W., our humble bartender, fixed us our lovely drinks--I had a Vieux Carre; order that in your average bar!--and we quietly drank our nightcaps, chatting and surrounded by a pleasant hum of conversation, and warmly patted the gleaming bartop of comforting burnished wood.