"Thank You. Your Reservation has been Confirmed."

Miracles do happen, people.

Okay, so I'm not sure the word "Miracle" is quite accurate, but it certainly did feel like a "gift" was bestowed upon us this morning at 10:00am when Dave finally got THROUGH on OpenTable.com for our (soon-to-be) beloved French Laundry reservation and the words, "Thank You. Your Reservation has been Confirmed" appeared before us!


Ahhhhhhhhhh

As you may recall, French Laundry has been playing hard-to-get with us ever since we started attempting to get a reservation back in May. My first attempt involved hitting "redial" 162 times and not getting anywhere (May 19, 2008) and my next major push was in July with over 300 calls (July 28, 2008). Last week, in desperation, Dave even put his programming skills to work in order to develop an application that would alert all 4 of us (Dave, Chris, Valerie and me) when OpenTable opened up with a reservation (the system would check online, on that particular page of OpenTable, every 30 seconds and alert us via email and text). No, I am not even kidding.

So imagine our SURPRISE - as if we won the LOTTERY - when Dave scored a reservation on his own this morning via OpenTable! The date is of course exactly 2 months out to the date - January 24, 2009. It's a Saturday (at 5:30pm no less!) and we'll look forward to 9 courses of divine cuisine. Valerie has already vowed to start fasting now so that she is adequately prepared to devour the Thomas Keller dishes come January.

Thank you, Chrissy & Jon and Mom & Dad Bryand, for giving us this opportunity with our fantastic birthday gifts!