Eventful times since the last entry. I left Scranton around noon on Friday and went home for about an hour before leaving again to go visit Annie in Baltimore. I planned on getting down there about three, but traffic caused me to show up at 6:30. She surprised me with a bottle of Tommy Hilfiger cologne that I haven’t really been able to afford for a while and also quite a few printouts of a comic we like. She also decorated her room in festive birthday decorations, which I noticed immediately (inside joke)! Annie and I went over to the Towson Town Center and she treated me to a birthday dinner at Rainforest Café. When I make my millions, I want an enormous fish tank and a night sky built into the bedroom ceiling. Annie and I both ordered roasted turkey and bacon wraps with some of the best steak fries ever. After dinner, we walked around the mall for a bit before calling it a night.
On Saturday, we went back over to Towson and went to a few stores, but mostly just Barnes & Noble and Borders. I love large bookstores; they’re so much better than the boring little Waldenbooks in the malls. After spending obscene amounts of time in both, I decided to buy O’Reilly’s PHP Cookbook, which seems to be leaps and bounds over the Peachpit Press books by Larry Ullman. It actually explains why certain functions are used! I’ll write up more about the book after I try out some of the recipes.
Annie and I ate Flamer’s food in the mall’s food court and then hit up the cinema for School of Rock using her student ID: $6/ticket in Towson! School of Rock was not only as good as I had hoped, but also it was better than I expected. Jack Black rocked like only he can and the soundtrack was excellent. In general, I highly recommend the movie to anyone looking for a good light comedy. Annie and I ordered some pizza when we got back to campus and watched Saturday Night Live with Justin Timberlake acting as both the host and the musical guest; he did not rock. Nor did the hour and a half that it took for Domino’s to deliver.
Sunday was another good day. Annie and I went to the Cathedral for Mass and then went to Ruby Tuesday’s for lunch; it was good—as always—and really nice to not have to rush home after Mass (as is usual when I have to go back to Scranton on Sunday). We then went grocery shopping at Giant so Annie isn’t forced to eat the delicious food in her cafeteria.
I left Baltimore at about 4:00 PM so that I could be home in time for a little birthday dinner that my family was throwing for me and my dad (his birthday is the eighth). My mom made lasagna with salad and garlic bread that was all quite delicious. And then there was cake; by this time, I was starting to feel like I was going to explode, with Ruby Tuesday’s already devoured, I was full halfway through salad. Twenty-one is the year of the computer I suppose, as the cake was decorated with an old-school computer with a monochrome monitor.
For my birthday, I received a nice supply of cards with valuable monetary gifts enclosed, a Kodak Easy Share Camera Dock for my digital camera, Bleachers by John Grisham, and a gold pocket watch from my dad that he received for his twenty-first birthday. All in all it was a great birthday weekend.