We slept today until about 9:15 and did the usual Saturday morning stuff, sans the going out for breakfast.  I mowed the lawn and Amanda went out to get some eggs and orange juice.  I think she cleaned up while I was inside too.  After that I took a shower and we went out to do a bit of shopping for tax free weekend.

We had a thing from Old Navy where you got 20% off anything you could put in a bag.  I got some shirts, Amanda got some tank tops.  Amanda gave me some disappointing news then we stopped by Lowe’s to look at a tile for our new outside table and to see if they had any standing outdoor fans.  We went to Target next to get some supplies for the mystery project that Amanda’s working on as well as some stuff for a cookout this afternoon.  Amanda told me last night that her co-worker Alison and her boyfriend Mike were coming over today.  Mike’s birthday is… Tuesday I think.

I discovered an issue with my laptop, which apparently happens to some copies of Windows Vista.  When it boots up it won’t load explorer.exe, which severely limits the functionality.  I was looking for solutions online, but Amanda got me to call Circuit City and ask them about it.  They got me to hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE then go to File -> Run and manually make explorer.exe launch.  Kind of a pain in the butt.  Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to make it so I don’t have to do that every time I turn the laptop on.

We spent a bit of time cleaning up some more and Amanda made some salad and marinated the chicken.  While that was going on I loaded the most resource-intensive game that I have, Medieval 2: Total War, on the laptop to see how it ran.  I didn’t get to test it out until later in the night, but it ran quite well.  It certainly loaded things a lot more quickly than my desktop computer does.

Alison and Mike got here around 6:00 with their little Jack Russell, Roxie.  She was, of course, very hyper.  I started up the grill for the chicken and when I was finishing that Mike put on some shrimp skewers.  There was one shrimp that had a skewer all to itself and we all felt sorry for it.  The chicken, if I do say so myself, was rather good.  This, particularly, when I’ve only used the grill a couple times before.  It was very tender and juicy.

After we ate and had cake then Mike and I played some Gears of War, which I haven’t played in forever.  Of course, he’d never played so i had a little advantage on him.  He did kill me twice though- once because I stuck him with a grenade and I didn’t get away from him fast enough and another time when I was trying to be cocky and kill him with a shotgun while he mowed me down with a machine gun.

Zach Dotsey