owen

Saturday was my birthday, and I decided to take off work on the day before.  I think that was a good decision, because Friday turned out to be a pretty good day.

In the morning, Berta, Abby, and I went to Penn's Table in West Chester for breakfast.  I had some chipped beef gravy on toast.  Abby ate a bit of Berta's food, since she had eaten cereal before leaving the house.  It's better to give her food than to have her scream until breakfast arrives.  So that was good.  It's nice in there at 9am on Friday because it's not crowded.

We dropped Abby off with Nana at her house, and headed over to Bradford Square where the Avante salon is.  Berta had arranged an appointment for me with Cathy.  She's a masseuse.  The massage was an hour long.  I'm keeping the details of it to myself to maintain a sense of mystery.  Oooo.

After that, we ran errands.  The bank.  Actually, I think that's the only errand we ran.

From the bank, we stopped by the movie theater to check show times.  A showing of The Two Towers started at 12pm, and we had 15 minutes until that began.  Instead of driving home to get the coupon, I made the executive decision to just pay the matinee price.  Anyway, we bought some popcorn and a soda and watched the whole thing.  It was pretty good.  The computer animation was very immersive.  You rarely questioned it, unlike, say, Titanic with its fake computer-generated billowing smoke.  I think the dwarven comedy relief might have been the tiniest little bit over the top, but it was still funny and good.  ("I should have picked a better spot.")

We then had lunch at Max and Erma's.  It's a very strange restaurant (and an annoying web site).  They specialize in burgers.  But there aren't very many on the menu.  And the owners, who one would assume are "Max and Erma" but are probably some shell owned by Coke, admit on the back of their dessert card that they bought the name of the restaruant (was it that good?) back in 19-aught-2-or-something, and changed the entire menu to serve burgers.  And they have fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.  Weird.  Not to mention that every worker we encountered seemed very openly gay.

After lunch, we went over to the Bowling Palace and bowled a few games.  Berta actually won the last one (99)!  I bet she's glad I convinced her to bowl one last round before we picked up Abby.  However, I'm sorry to say that neither of us bowled over a 100 the entire time.

On my actual birthday, I was ill, didn't feel like going out, and got to sit through Dave and Bob arguing over who gets how many plusses in their strength checks depending on their gargantuan or large sizes.  Stinking drow spiders.

Yesterday, on Sunday, Berta, Abby, Dave, and I went to Delaware to spend some gift certificates.  At Between Books I got an Exalted supplement for the Lunars.  Bascially, Werewolves.  Another White Wolf game.  <sigh>

Best Buy yeilded better results.  I got a Microsoft Bluetooth cordlesss mouse, a new hub (for the basement), and a couple of Anime DVDs.  I'm still looking for some other useful Bluetooth device to hook to the computer.