July 12, 2010 8:00 AM

Good morning!

So, how was your weekend?

On Friday night, I went over to a friend's house and watched the old Batman and Robin movie with Uma Thurman... and ate some of the best gazpacho out there! I had a pretty great time, and I have got to say - I looked forward to coming in to work today to write up how my weekend had gone!

I guess what my friends told me about blogging being addicting was true!

On Saturday morning, I got up at 8:30am (which is late compared to my normal 5:30am on weekdays). After a quick shower and breakfast, Jersey (one of my flat-mates) and Tony (one of my best guy friends) dragged me out of the apartment to go to the public market! Once there, we used coupons from the Rochester City newspaper to get empanadas and fruit drinks for just a penny! We had cut out too many this week since we thought other people would be coming to join us at the market - so I handed three of them out to other people.

One of the girls from Friday night showed up, and once she got her empanada, we started shopping! All the produce and fruit looked pretty great, and I ended up buying quite a bit! After we parted at the market, the two boys and I went to the Asia Market, where I picked up some tofu, veggie noodles, and green tea buns.

Lunch was fried noodles with tofu and veggies, and I played Tales of Symphonia for a few hours - I don't play video games at all, so it took me like an hour and a half just to figure out the controls. I gave up just after 5pm and re-read Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown. It was pretty great, and there were more funny sections than I remembered.

For dinner, I didn't eat much. In fact, I think I spend the rest of the night zoning out in front of my computer screen, reading the plot-line for the game I had been playing earlier - now that I know how it ends, I can't say I really want to play it anymore...

On Sunday, I got up at 8:00am and showered and ate before hurrying down the infamous "Quarter Mile" - an stretch of walk-way going down the middle of RIT's campus that actually is a third of a mile (despite it's name). I got to church early enough to practice the music for this Sunday, and then we celebrated Mass.

Afterwards, I scurried home and crashed for half an hour until the president of the pro-life club on campus, Life Right RIT, (of which I am the secretary) picked me up. Then we went to a potluck picnic at the park where the rest of the members here in the summer met up with us, along with a retired programmer who lives nearby. We had an enjoyable time, and most of the folks from the picnic went over to one guy's place for the World Cup game after.

I went home and crashed again - waking up in time for the two boys, my other flat-mate called Urug, and I to head out to Yummy Cafe to buy some cheap Chinese food. I got Thai Peanut Sauce on my tofu and veggies, and it was pretty good. The brown rice I ordered was not very good at all, but the boys gave me their white rice so I was fine. They say its not very good there, but it was much better than the brown rice I got.

I'll probably eat the leftover rice with my lunch today when I get home from work. I am way too lazy to make my own rice (it takes 40 mins! That's too much work!), so I always enjoy getting it at other places. It's much easier to put noodles in boiling water and wait three minutes.

After dinner, we went to Wegmans (a supermarket chain up north) and bought the things we didn't get at the market - for me, this was spinach, celery, bread, and salsa, though I did put a bunch of stuff in Jersey's carts since he owes me. After we unloaded the groceries, Tony and Jersey went over to one guy's house to pick up a card game called Settlers of Catan.

I'll try to explain the game here - the board is an island that is divided up into different sections of land that can produce different commodities. So, there are plains where you get sheep, fields for grain, mountains for ore, forests for wood, and red dusty plains for brick. There is also a desert section of the map.

If you combine certain resources like brick and wood, you can build roads, settlements, cities, or buy development cards. The goal of the game is to get 10 victory points - and these can be obtained by owning cities, settlements, longest road, or development cards.

Development cards can range from soldiers (who allow you to steal a commodity from a nearby player among other things), to calling a monopoly (which allows you to take all of one type of card from every other player), to getting a victory point.

So, you basically want to build settlements on the parts of the board that overlap several commodities so you can get some of everything. There's more to the game than this, but this is the basic outline.

Anyway, we had a great time last night, and I wasn't as cut-throat as I usually am! though Urug complained that I was really hard on him (he was winning the whole game though, so of course I would be mean to him). We ended just past midnight, and I went to bed.

This morning I got up at 5:30am, showered, and then zoned out on the couch. I didn't feel like eating or doing much of anything, but I managed to choke down some food before walking to work today with Jersey.

And here I am!