Helvetica FTW!

Friday:

I got to the gym at 7:00 a.m. to find a trainer full of apologies and excuses for double booking. It was fine; I hadn't gotten very much sleep the night before. I did half an hour of cardio and came home.

I had second breakfast (a banana and some soy nut butter) and tried to get in an early nap. That didn't work, so I surfed around online and read a bit. I sorted through a few crafting materials and I painted for a while.

Later in the afternoon, I took a shower and got dressed. Then I sat outside in the afternoon sun--it was hot!--and read, but I could only sit out for about ten minutes before I overheated and came back in and went back to painting. My new thing is copycatting Christopher Wool's stuff, some of it, just to see where it leads. So far I've been working in a book, but I've got some blank canvas stashed away that I'm going to switch to.

Dave was home a bit early as we had planned to meet my mom and aunt for dinner. We met up at the Dion's near my aunt's house and had pizza and salad. My mom and aunt had salads and subs. We sat and chatted for about 90 minutes--my aunt told us about her recent pinon-picking trip and my mom told us about her recent casino wins--then Dave and I came home via the craft store. I wanted to pick up a few sets of letter stencils in different sizes.

Saturday:

I woke up with a killer headache. Dave did, too. Hope we're not coming down with something. It was bad enough that I took an ibuprofen, which I almost never do--and never for headaches. It dulled it a bit.

Dave went off to his clarinet lesson and I stayed home to shower and dress. I wanted to paint using my new letter stencils, but the largest of them was missing two sheets of letters. Grrrr! I used the next largest.  Dave came home just as I was finishing up.

Here's something surreal that happened next: Dave was craving a burger, so we talked about places where he could get a veggie burger. He had mentioned, years ago, having a veggie burger at Red Robin (a chain restaurant that I've never been to). He checked and, yes, they still have veggie burgers, so we went there. I say it was surreal and it was because the two of us never, but never go to chain restaurants unless we're going out with someone who wants to eat there. We never go there by ourselves. So I don't know how it was that we found ourselves walking into a loud, "nostalgically" decorated restaurant with giant screen TVs playing sports and a bar that serves the world's most erratically mixed, disgusting-sounding cocktails. We asked for a booth.

We ordered a $13 tower of onion rings (slightly undercooked, but the best part of the meal in my opinion) and then Dave had some veggie burger concoction that had about fifteen things on it, a bunch of weird sauces, fried onions, blue cheese and god knows what else. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger that arrived slathered with mayonnaise. I mean, really. My burger was terrible, but I stripped off the bun and ate the patty and undercooked bacon for the protein. The plates came with "bottomless" sides (lukewarm sweet potato fries for me and barely warmed but mostly raw "steamed" broccoli for Dave). We finished up with some cronut ripoff, also served in a tower. Those were not horrible, although the hot fudge sauce that came with them was like melted, canned frosting.

Our waitress was good (though the meal was not) and at her urging we even signed up for one of their frequent rewards deals (using my fake email account and a phone number to a landline that we haven't had in fifteen years).

But the experience is not one that I need to repeat, ever. And the loud environment did nothing to help my headache, which was beating the sad little ibuprofen into submission rather than vice versa.

After lunch, we went by the pet store for cat food, then to Target for a few things, none of which I can remember right now. After that, we went by the craft store and exchanged the incomplete set of letter stencils. Then we went by the pharmacy. Dave needed to get a haircut so we went to do that. (I stayed in the car nursing my headache, which was turning into its own little drama.) Finally we came home.

I went straight to bed, read for a few minutes, and then fell asleep. I napped for about an hour and got up to a newly refreshed headache. The nap really gave it a change to regroup.

I had a bowl of vanilla ice cream, because why not? And I surfed the internet for awhile.

That brings me up to right this minute. It's only 5:00 p.m. and I just took another ibuprofen. I hope this is the silver bullet, so to speak, the one that knocks out the headache (although just the clacking of the keyboard keys is making it feel worse). Ugh.