(no subject)

So Friday was visit Mom day. I ended up there around lunch time and we went to a Chinese buffet. It was okay, but a bit bland. They did have a huge mural of a phoenix that covered half a wall that was keen. After that, we went to (shudder) the Supa-Wal-Mart for a country ham. These are the ones that you find hanging on hooks and are initially saltier than salt. Alton Brown has what looks like a really tasty recipe involving one of these hams and DrPepper. Anyway, we didn't find country hams at the local grocery store here so when I left and asked hub if I should get him anything in Bryan, he said 'yeah, see if they have one of those hams.' So when I got to Bryan, Mom called the local fancy meatery and asked if they had them. They said 'no, and neither does anyone else.' Well, fie, because Mom remembered seeing them at the Supa-Wal-Mart and they confirmed over the phone that they had them. So we picked it up and got out of there as quickly as we could.

Next, entertainment. Off to Hastings to rent videos. Neither of us had seen 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding', and they also had Miyazaki's 'Castle in the Sky' so I talked Mom into it and we got them both. MBFGW was, in a word, simplistic. I thought the boyfriend caved way too easily to anything the chick or her family wanted without a word of complaint, and swore undying love for her from the start for no apparent reason. I mean, I just didn't get why he seemed so smitten with her- he seemed too cardboard. So, eh. CITS was long, like over 2 hours. But it was typical of him- very beautiful with a complex story line that was just terrific. It didn't grab me quite the way 'Spirited Away' did (must get a copy of that at some point!) but I still give it a big thumbs up.

I also did some clean-up on her computer. She had bought an optical mouse but couldn't get it working, mainly because her cd drive refused to read the driver disk. Or something. So I got that working after awhile and did some other minor stuff like clean up her email and remove some spyware. She had over 12,000 spams in her 'Deleted Items' file and made the reasonable assumption that if you put something in the Deleted Items file, that it would get deleted at some point. *rolls eyes* Thanks, Microsoft!

Anyway, it was after midnight by the time I got home, so I had a quick swim to get the nicotine smell off, and crawled into bed.

Saturday

Hub ran his first D&D campaign. It was more of an intro session to get us all used to playing. I was the only experienced player- Brö and Tom have only played a little 3rd Ed, and Bob'd never played at all. So it was 1st level characters wading through a bunch of 10x10 rooms with orcs sitting on treasure chests, so to speak. It was quite a lot of fun, actually. The map of the dungeon looked exactly like a uterus, though hub swears that was a coincidence. We ended in the right-handed ovary, from the woman's point of view and will pick it up in a couple of weeks.

As we pulled up, though, there was this lovely royal blue velvety love seat by the dumpster near Brö's apartment. I yelled 'I want that couch!' so we got out and examined it. It had some pet fur on it, but didn't smell funky nor could we find anything else immediately wrong with it. So down went the back seat, a little re-arranging, and the think is in the back of my van! As we were hauling it off, a cry came from somewhere else in the complex- "Couch Thief!" but I think it was a guy who we saw earlier who probably wanted the couch for himself. Too slow, baby! Hub's Fabreezed it and plumped it up and cleaned it off, and says it's a fine couch. Huzzah!