If you use (or need to use) Microsoft Office for anything you do, try OpenOffice instead. If you’re used to Microsoft Office, there’s very little learning curve (at least in Word vs. Writer), and it’s FREE.

Sorry for the weird non-sequitur-ish plug post. I can’t help it, I’m just terribly impressed with OpenOffice and I feel the need to spread the word. To the whole 4 people who might care, but still.

Taken with one of my birthday presents (that arrived today!), a new digital camera that totally KILLS my old camera in quality and features at a third of the price. My old Kodak EasyShare DX4330 now goes for about $30 on eBay. Mine isn’t even worth that much though, as I think I’ve nearly killed it.

Of course, this new one almost too good. You can see all the little bits of cat food that Lish somehow manages to get everywhere and I’m a little slack about cleaning up.

Enjoy the cat picture now - there aren’t likely to be many more. I’ve had it for about 3 hours and Lish has already learned to hate this camera as much as my old one.

So has David:

Sadly, I am still waiting for the thing that I mentioned in the last post, so I am still dying to tell you about it but won’t. It will either be a really cool story or a sad lament. But you’ll just have to wait and see…

In the meantime, I’m starting to feel human again, finally. My humanity was in question last night. This weekend I ended up going 34 hours without sleep - the longest stretch I’ve ever pulled - and even after getting 10 hours of sleep Sunday morning / afternoon, the effects of sleep deprivation (combined with some junk food binging) had me feeling really funky. It was not a pretty sight. I’m still off kilter a bit - which is probably why I’m still awake at 4 AM - but I’m feeling better.

Long, boring story as short as I can make it: David and I had to go to his sister’s wedding at a location damn close to the coast of Virginia this weekend. We drove down for the wedding over Friday night and drove home Saturday evening. Staying overnight with his family wasn’t really an option, due to work commitments and financial considerations, but it had been made clear to us that our attendance was not optional. So despite the scant 2 weeks notice and encroachment on my birthday weekend (I turned 32 on Thursday!), we did what we could.

The drive was long and tedious - nearly 10 hours there and 11-plus to get home. Since most of our driving was done at night, there wasn’t much to look at, and David tried to nap for a notable portion of the trip (since he’d had to work Friday, he was operating on even less sleep than I was), so it was mainly just me and the 10 mixtape CDs I’d made for the trip. (Though I did giggle a little every time I saw the sign “Speed limit enforced by aircraft.” The phrasing just causes me to imagine low flying military craft circling overhead waiting to “enforce” the speed limit by launching a missile at the next red Mustang that goes racing by.)

There were a few things that really made the whole trip worthy. On the drive from the hotel where his family was staying to the wedding, I spotted a Food Lion (which is a prominent grocery chain in the Southeast), at which point I had an epiphany: I could stock up on Duke’s Mayonnaise at a normal price! (Ok, so as epiphanies go, not the most profound one ever, but you have to try and understand how important my Duke’s stock really is to me - when I order it online I pay $5 a jar.) We stopped on the way back to the reception and grabbed as much Duke’s as we could carry (along with some other assorted items, like a 6 pack of Sun-Drop for Marshall). Happiness temporarily replaced the dread of the drive still to come.

Of course, I had already planned another part of the trip that would make it a real success. The day before we were to leave, it dawned on me that there are Bojangles’¹ locations in Virginia. Though my initial excitement over this realization faded some when I noted that none of those locations was even close to our route, careful study of the list of their locations when compared to my Google maps travel plan led me to conclude that by going around the other side of Washington D.C. as we headed home, we could leave the freeways briefly, destined for a Maryland Bojangles’ location and grab a bunch of sausage biscuits, seasoned fries, and a half dozen Bo-berries. Though it proved to lengthen our trip by nearly an hour (partly because of traffic near D.C., partly because of the sloooooooow service at the Bojangles’), I’m still glad we did it. Our detour enabled me to at least glance at some D.C. landmarks as we drove past, where our original path would have been too far away from the actual city to see anything. And David - who has listened to me extol the virtues of the Bojangles’ sausage biscuit for 5 years now - after finally getting to taste one Saturday evening proclaimed that it was indeed well worth the extension to our drive. I fully agreed, seeing as it had been 4 years since the last time those buttery biscuits had graced my tastebuds. Plus they gave us a sweet potato pie for free since we had been gracious about the long wait for our order, and that was a most delectable freebie. (I don’t remember that being a menu item last time I was there either, but that could just be a faulty memory.)

Oh yeah, the wedding and the reception were nice too. And I do truly like David’s family, so it was nice to spend some time with them. But the mayonnaise and sausage biscuits were the stars for me.

Is that wrong?

 

 

¹ I shall endeavor to explain a little, as I know not all of you reading this will know what I’m yammering on about here. (Those of you who do know though I’ll bet can understand…) Bojangles’ is a fast food Cajun style chicken n’ biscuits restaurant that started in Charlotte, NC and now can be found throughout much of the Southeast U.S., but not in most of the rest of the country. (Stop before you say it! No, Popeye’s is NOT the same thing. Not by a long stretch.) Though there are other menu items worth mentioning, Bojangles’ has perfected the Southern specialty of the sausage biscuit, and delivers it fast food style. No other fast food outlet can even come close (though way back in the day - before Carl’s Jr. took over the chain - Hardee’s was a contender). The things that McDonald’s and Burger King market as such should not ever be referred to as sausage biscuits, as neither component is actually sausage or biscuit. (Though I’m guessing “grayish, gristle filled, formed meat patty sandwiched between layers of frozen-then-reheated flour paste” wouldn’t sell very well, it is a much more accurate description.) And then there’s the Bo-berry… a blueberry biscuit drizzled with icing… yum!

Whenever I’ve been back to North Carolina to visit, my first stop after leaving the rental car place has always been the Bojangles’ just outside the Charlotte Douglas airport, and I’ve always tried to make it the last place I visit before going back into the airport. When my dad returned to the States after living in Germany for 8 years, the first thing he wanted to do was go to Bojangles’. Yes, really. It is *that* good.