May 27, 2003

Tra La! It’s May! The Lusty Month of May!

And so Memorial Day weekend 2003 winds down to an end. For being the unofficial start of summer, I sure do feel soggy. It’s rained and rained and rained.

Rick and Helen came up on Friday night… Earl went to bed early to relieve some work-related stress, so I waited up for them. We ended up b.s.-ing until 1:30 in the morning, catching up on family happenings and whatnot.

Saturday we decided to head to Syracuse to do some shopping at Carousel Center. I picked up some stuff from CompUSA for work. Earl picked up some snazzy new sneakers at “The Finish Line”. Rick looked at quite a few shoes as well but didn’t get any. At Borders, he did pick up the cookbook and BBQ sauce kit for Dinosaur BBQ. We had taken them to Dinosaur last summer and it must have made quite an impression!

After Syracuse, we headed to Casa Too Mucha, Earl and my favorite restaurant. We had never been there on a Saturday night. Not nearly as busy as Friday’s night, but nonetheless enjoyable. Afterwards we watched “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” on DVD. Enjoyed the movie, but I thought it wasn’t quite as good as the first.

On Sunday we headed out to the Utica Zoo. I hadn’t been to the local zoo in quite a while so I was kind of intrigued to see what was going on. Unfortunately, the zoo seems to be undergoing some financial hardship or something. It’s nice enough, but it seems to have a certain feel of neglect when it comes to the grounds. The animals looked very happy and well taken care of, which is the most important part of course.

After a much needed nap, we decided to go see “Bruce Almighty”. Great movie… very funny! I’m not a big Jim Carrey fan, but I didn’t find him too unbearable in this. I thought the movie was well done, and having lived in Western N.Y. a number of years ago, it was a kick to see all the Buffalo landmarks and such (it takes place in Buffalo).

After the movie we went to Turning Stone casino. We haven’t been there in about a year. The place has grown by leaps and bounds! Sad to say that we didn’t win anything, but had a good time nonetheless. I need to get away from the machines and start playing roulette again. Maybe when we go down to Philly next month we can make a side trip to Atlantic City on Saturday night.

Today’s been a lazy day… Rick and Helen headed out this morning – Earl and I have been catching up on laundry and I’ve been messing around with the computer, getting it tweaked to the way I like it. I’m doing pretty well with Mandrake still, though I’m having a couple of issues with my web page maintenance that I’ll work through somehow, even if I have to learn how to code the blasted things by hand.