My birthday was last Friday, it was nice, yes!   Jessica took me to a French restaurant over by Grand Lake/ Lake Merrit for dinner.  The food was great – but the service was S – L – O – W.  I thought – oh – this must be what it's like for Loren.    And to make matters worse, I hadn't eaten lunch that day, and it was 8pm and I was STARVING, and they didn't even take our order until like 8:45 or something, it was crazy!  I had to stop someone and ask them to PLEASE bring me some bread or crackers or something, so I didn't fall over dead on their floor!

I shared a bowl of dungeoness crab chowder (yummy) & baked brie with crostinis (brie wasn't that great), then I had the Chicken Provencal (Super Yummy) and then some sort of chocolatey cake thing for dessert that they put on a giant silver platter, and it had a bunch of little hearts made out of sauces all over it – very pretty. 

Boy – what a crazy run on sentence – ha!  Anyway – after dinner I think I went home and got caught up on some TV – I think I might have watched Lost and Heroes.  I love those shows. 

(Did you know you can watch the latest episode of Heroes at http://www.nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/?show=heroes)  It comes on Monday nights, so if you go to the web each Tuesday or Wednesday you could watch the full season!  Ooh – I see ABC is putting Lost online too – how cool is that?!?  Check out: http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/player?mk=20152622&cid=7 or go to http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing – either one should get you there.

The next day – I crammed crammed crammed as much cleaning, shopping, and yard work as I possibly could into a single day.  I bought pumpkins (and another set of carving tools) from Albertsons, a giant 12 qt pot from Bed Bath & Beyond (for the chicken and sausage gumbo I was about to make!), several bags of mulch from home depot, a couple of bags of cedar chips from Petco (I wanted to redo the mulchy area behind the patio), and several bottles of wine from BevMo.

The gumbo was awesome of course, and 10 people showed up to the party.  It was a pretty good size, just enough people to all sit around the table outside.  Carla and Beverly gave me a b-day present, which was a giant coffee mug that says "Computer Genius" on it.  Ha.

Sunday we went to the movies, and saw The Prestige.  It was really good.  Weird, but good.  Monday I had dinner  w/ friends @ Toomies.

On Halloween I went to a Haunted House in Fremont called the Pirates of Emerson.  They had three {attractions?}:  the 1st was a 3D ocean scene, so you're walking through w/ those silly 3D glasses on, can't see ANYTHING, and people (pirates) are jumping out at you all over the place.  The 2nd was a maze made totally out of 10 foot chainlink fence.  They have strobe lights going so that messes with your eyes, plus it's hard to focus that much chain link anyway – so you end up walking into fence every now and then, pretty trippy.  The 3rd thing was another haunted house – er – haunted ship – thing, where you go through and there's all sort of scary things jumping out at ya – you know the deal.  It was a lot of fun!

I posted the pics from the camping/coast trip and the pumpkin party in the Gallery.