Dominica got up sometime before me this morning and started working on her homework that is due today. Oreo stayed in bed (on the living room floor) which me and snuggled until eleven! He is such a snuggly dog.
Once I was up there wasn’t very much time before we all had to be ready to go. We have Abigail Hughes’ baptism party early this afternoon in downtown Utica at a lounge called Grimaldi’s which I have never been to before. The Utica area is full of weird mid-century holdout businesses that I have only ever seen previously in the movies or old pictures. Utica has a bizarre sense of remaining in 1948 no matter what happens in the outside world. At every turn you expect to hear strains of big bands and lounge singers, to see people ordering martinis and side-cars and smoking stogies. Utica hit its stride in the post-World War II era and decided to stop right there. That isn’t to say that it is bad. The era that Utica chose to stick with was a good one but the bands and the lounge singers are gone now and the remaining architecture and signage seems out of place and it makes much of the city seem closed and out of business even when some of these places are very alive and, in fact, thriving.
The party was very nice and the food was excellent at Grimaldi’s, especially the desserts. Dominica and I both fell off of the wagon pretty significantly this weekend. It is difficult being at several functions strung back to back where the main focus is eating food that is completely off of our allowed menus. So we pretty much just wrote the weekend off as a loss and hope to not be set back too much when we return to New Jersey tomorrow.
After the party we did some shopping with Joe and Francesca. Joe has been wanting to get an HDTV for his college apartment in Albany so we went out to the shops to see what there was. We went to Best Buy and he didn’t find any televisions that caught his eye but I managed to get all of the Palm Treo supplies that I have been needing which was really handy because going out shopping in Newark is so difficult for things like this that we would never get around to it.
For my Palm Treo 700p I picked up a 2GB SD flash memory card so that I can store tons of Audible books, podcasts and music on my PDA (I wanted 4GB but they didn’t carry that at that store,) a car charger, the official Palm belt pouch which is very nice, the Motorola BlueTooth hands free ear piece and a stereo Motorola leather padded headset for listening to music and other stereo material from the device via BlueTooth. I am anxious to try that feature out. It was not a cheap shopping trip for us but it was a lot of essential usability items that I think that I will get a tremendous amount of use out of.
Dominica did some video game shopping too and got a second DDR dance pad so that we can “supposedly” get some exercise without leaving the apartment and both SingStar karaoke video games for the PS2 (it is a different series than Francesca has.) We also got two copies of Age of Empires: Age of Kings for the Nintendo DS. It doesn’t look to be anywhere near as cool as the PC version but the games were on sale for less than half their normal price and with two copies we can attempt to play head to head and that might be enough to make it well worth it. We will see.
At Circuit City Joe and I just happened to find an open-box 50″ 720p Samsung real-project DLP television that just had a minor scratch on the front glass for just $720 USD which is less than half its normal price. He couldn’t resist and decided to buy it. That saved him a ton of money over anything else that he might have considered buying.
We hung out at Dominica’s parents’ house for a few hours before leaving for the weekend. Dominica had some homework that she needed to wrap up before we could leave so she set to work on that and Francesca, Madeline and I sat down and did some more karaoke video gaming.
Before we left Dominica’s father and I took Madeline and Emily out to the Knight Spot to get some ice cream. They had run out to get ice cream from the ice cream truck a little earlier but it had driven by and ignored them so they were sad.
It was about eight in the evening when we finally hit the road. The drive home went pretty well and we arrived around midnight. We were glad to be home and were very ready to be sleeping in our own bed again. Oreo was very excited to be the only dog once more.
Weight Lost So Far: No Weigh In Estimating 18lbs