What a difference a date makes! I went out with Elaine, whom I met on my hike last week. We were supposed to go to Wild Fish but I couldn't get reservations so I decided that we should go to Eddie V's.

I called her during the week to finalize the tentative plans we had made during the hike. I wasn't sure she was going to go through with it because our phone conversation was a bit awkward. I didn't stay on the call very long as there seemed to be a lot of uncomfortable pauses on both our parts. I think this helped lower my expectations of our dinner quite a bit. That was probably a good thing.

I picked her up at her place Saturday evening. Wow, she looked good. I remember that I thought she was little chunky when I first met her on the hike, but now she looked pretty hot. She had her hair down and it reached the small of her back. It's a really attractive reddish-brown color, auburn, I guess.

The dinner was excellent and the conversation was even better. We pretty much told each other our life stories. This totally reminded me of a study I read about in which people that exchanged personal stories about themselves felt much closer to each other than people who just made regular small-talk. I did feel that we hit it off pretty well. We had arrived at 5:30pm and we stayed talking until around 8pm.

After dinner I took her straight home. She lives in my condo complex a couple of buildings down near the pool area. I feel a little nervous about that but not too much as I can't remember ever running in to her before. On the way home I asked for another date right away. I was thinking I might go to Los Angeles again the following weekend and since I'm booked during the entire week, my only free day is Monday. Otherwise, it would be more than a week before we could get together again. I was pleasantly surprised when she immediately agreed to my suggestion of a movie date. As I walked her to her door, I was nervous about whether I should kiss her or not but she made that decision for me and she just gave me a nice hug.