And here we are, safely through Lent and able to eat what we want again. I may have mentioned in a previous post but if you missed it, I gave up pork for lent. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Hot dogs, for example, are easily found made of beef. Same with bologna too. True, I couldn't eat brats or a pepperoni pizza but I managed to get by. What was killing me was the meatless Fridays. I'm not a big veggie fan nor do I eat much fish so taking away my meats pretty much means I go vegetarian for the day. Fortunately they're doing marvelous stuff with soy and I was able to get by using that.
I'm having a very long weekend at the moment. CC and I went out for Sunday brunch at Texas de Brazil so I had to get Sunday off. That wasn't really a problem and so it was looking like I'd have a three day weekend. Ah, not so fast. You see on Thursday I went to work and found out that corporate wanted us to reduce the amount of hours budgeted to the salon by about a third or so. It happens from time to time, no big deal. In my case though, it ended up extending my weekend by a day. Since Thursday was so slow anyway, my boss told me to take the day off. So now my three day weekend is up to a FOUR day weekend. Not bad right? But wait, there's still more! I stopped off at the salon on the way home from my parents' house and checked to see if there were any changes I needed to know about for this week. Turns out I'm also off MONDAY too. It's now a FIVE day weekend for me! I haven't had this much time off since I took a vacation a while back.
What's going on here is that we're transitioning from the old schedule to the new one. The past two times we did this, I ended up working a six day week and a 9 day week. This is sort of balancing that out. My days off were at the end of last week and in the transition they're at the beginning. The week after that we'll slip into our normal schedule, assuming it hasn't changed again for some reason.
So, what have we been doing with all that free time? Not much really. I had a total of 1 afternoon's worth of chores and 5 days to spread them over. Instead of doing most of the work, CC and I ended up doing quite a bit of shopping and/or browsing. Thursday was the exception. I just totally blew off Thursday. Friday CC also had off so we went out to the mall looking for a few things. Didn't find any of them though. What we DID find was a HUGE crowd. A whole lot of people took Friday off this year and a good chunk of them decided to go visit the mall. We also saw Blades of Glory, the new Will Farrell movie. DAMN funny, especially if you like Farrell or figure skating. It might not be everybody's cup of tea but it sure had us laughing all the way through.
Saturday was another shopping day of sorts. I had a prescription that needed to be refilled and CC needed to grab a few things for her trip. That didn't take long so we decided to check out the outdoor mall. Hit the bookstore, had coffee and cheesecake. Ok, I had chai latte actually, CC had coffee and instead of cheesecake she had some sort of chocolate thing that was REALLY rich but you get the idea. That pretty much took care of the afternoon and that was about all we did Saturday.
Today, busy again and a trip to yet ANOTHER mall. We had our Easter brunch, as I said, but it was so early when we finished that we decided to kill a little time downtown. We also need to walk off all that food we'd eaten.
Our first stop was the Peabody hotel, which is right next to where we ate. CC had never been inside before and I figured she'd like it. We walked through the lobby and over to the central fountain where the ducks hang out during the day. Every morning the ducks are paraded down from their rooftop home to the lobby. This is done with a lot of fanfare and it's a trademark of the hotel. Then, every evening, they're taken back up to the roof.
You can get really close to the ducks if you want. The lip of the fountain is only about a foot across and the ducks swim right up to the edge. If you wanted to, you could reach out and pet one I suppose. For some reason one particular duck decided she was going to wash herself right in front of me so I got splashed quite a few times. Didn't bother me any though. After working as a dog bather as long as I have, it takes more than a little water to make me flinch.
After the ducks we ran across a really fancy Chinese imports gallery. They seemed to deal mostly in jade and ivory. The pieces they had, sculpture, were HUGE. Well not all of them, but they had several HUGE pieces, let's put it that way. They had two or three sets of carved tusks. And when I say tusks, I don't mean the small ones you can put on a shelf or over your fireplace. These are the ones you can almost use as the archway to a DOOR. There were also several ivory pagodas that were hand carved. The biggest one was selling for $125,000.
We worked our way back to where we parked which meant going through another mall. It's much smaller than the two we'd visited on Friday and Saturday. We decided to stop in at the arcade there. It's a LOT better than the one at the big mall from Friday. The games we played Sunday were a lot more work really. There's a police trainer/shooter where you have to do a lot of ducking. It's not the one where you hit the little pedal and your character ducks. Oh no, if you want to duck in this game you have to actually bend your knees and DUCK. It's really fun but the longer you play it the longer you realize that probably you're not used to doing this much ducking on a daily basis.
Then we played two games of Hyperbowl. Have you seen this game? It's fantastic.
You stand in front of pedestal which is really just a HUGE trackball made out of a bowling ball. You roll and spin this ball down a SERIOUSLY complex bowling alley made to match various themes. I played San Francisco first where you roll the ball down one hill, then another, then a third, all the while dodging street cars, then UP a final hill where the pins sit. Talk about tough. After watching me, CC tried her hand at Yosemite which was basically bowling through a forest. Then we did a two player game using the Rome set. Just had a blast playing that game.Went to my parents' house after that for the rest of Easter. Spent some time with the family and played a few MORE video games with my nieces. Got home around 6:00 I suppose and that was pretty much the weekend.
Hope your Easter was as entertaining as our :-)
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