Last weekend was fall break. The football game was at Duke, and the band directors made it the rat trip, so I had the whole weekend free.

Friday afternoon Catherine and I left from school and first stopped at the Target up I-85, where Becky met up with us. That Target has a really big clothes section and we shopped for a bit, finding good things on the sale racks. All three of us got the same sweatshirt jackets that were around $5. It's nice to have a new soft-inside sweatshirt jacket. It's all fuzzy.

After Target we ate at a Mexican restaurant nearby that was quite good (and very popular, it was the nearby business communities lunch hour and the place was packed), and then went to the outlets in Commerce, Georgia. We went to the Vanity Fair outlets and got cheap bras and looked at the other outlets and couldn't find much except I got some decopague stuff at a craft outlet. There was a "Gourmet Chef" outlet and I wanted almost everything in there, especially their wall of implements. Sigh. Good Grips wooden spoons! Silicon pancake turners! Specialty ice cube trays! I can't wait to have my own kitchen so 1. I have enough space to store stuff and 2. roommates won't ruin it.

After that we got to Karen's apartment in South Carolina. She greeted us and her friend (and my Control group member) Ben made Thai red chicken curry, which was very good and incredibly spicy. We thought about seeing a movie but since there was nothing we wanted to see we played miniature golf, where all the girls got their butts whipped by Ben. I think he got a 43 and Catherine, Karen, and Becky were in the 50s and I got a 68 (I hit the stroke limit on everything but a few holes, including one random hole-in-one).

After miniature golf we went back to Karen's apartment and played charades, with such random things to act out as "hickory smoked bacon", "pointing," "Caligula," and "Africa."

The next day we woke up late, and Becky and Ben both headed out to spend the rest of the weekend with their families. In the afternoon Catherine, Karen, Karen's roommate Lin, and I went to the downtown fall festival, where there were lots of restaurants selling tastes of their menu items. We tried things like chocolate mousse cake, fried lobster tail, chicken teriyaki, pasta, and in a moment embarassingly captured for posterity with Catherine's digital camera's video feature, meat kabobs that were surprisingly difficult to eat.

That night we went to Sticky Fingers barbecue for dinner and I had ribs. They were really good. That place has excellent barbecue sauce.

Sunday we slept in late again and then roamed around, trying to shop and not really finding anything, and ended up at an Italian place for dinner that we'd tasted stuff from at the fall fest. I got Chicken "Emily Anna", which meant it was stuffed with prosciutto and fried in herb butter, served with fettucine alfredo and sauteed vegetables. It was very good. At that place, even the bread put on the table dripped olive oil. It was great.

That Monday Catherine and I drove back to Tech, stopping at the Commerce outlets on the side of the freeway we'd missed on the way up. We tried the Old Navy outlet and I found a very pretty slinky shirt I'm going to wear band banquet.

And after all that fun, I've spent the rest of the week madly doing homework, because I was supposed to leave at 4 am to fly to Miami for the Tech/University of Miami football game and come back Sunday night. And then Wilma happened, and the game got postponed, so I've been having a nicely relaxed weekend.