I HATE technology!

whew. Glad to get that off my chest. As you can probably guess I've had some trouble. But I'll start my narrative further back at the beginning of the weekend.

Saturday
On this morning, I got up rather early for a weekend. I opened my mom's Valentine's Day card/present to me and Patrick's letter. It was so nice to have mail that morning! And I got a surprise when I went downstairs for breakfast, because Patrick's present had come in the mail. yay! :) It was a nice start to the day.

I had gotten up early (not because I couldn't wait any longer to open my mail, but) because I had an appointment with STA travel to finish planning my Italy trip. I did that (it's done and paid for!) and Bethany (who is accompanying me) was there as well to show her passport and pay her half. Afterward, I went with her to Camden Town where we had lunch and looked in on a few shops. But it wasn't really striking me as a good place to look for boots (which I still haven't found. grr.), so I headed off to Covent Garden. Once I got there, I quickly aborted my plan and decided to go home, because...everyone in London seemed to be shopping! On Valentine's Day! sheesh! You would think that (if you had your partner with you) you would want to do something romantic. But no. People just want to shop. :P So I decided to leave the fray and go back to outer London--where it is sane--to wait out Valentine's Day.

I rested, did homework, and then Anne and I went out for dinner and a movie. Ros was heading out at the same time so she gave us a ride into town. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the restaurant we wanted (O'Niells), so we headed down to the theatre to see if there would be a good place to eat there. We ended up in this "cafe" by a bowling alley in the same building as the theatre. (We thought it was pretty cool that there is a bowling alley so close.) It was fine, except our hamburgers (or cheeseburger in Anne's case) were the toughest things I have had in a long time. bleh. It was so bad that it was funny. oh well. Then we went to the theatre to see He's Just Not That Into You. We were pretty early so we got some ice cream. (They had 31 Flavors in the Theater! although it didn't have 31 flavors...) I got two scoops of my favorite (Gold Medal Ribbon) as a Valentine's Day treat to myself. The movie was pretty good. It was very funny and cute and not completely cliche (but it was a romantic comedy, so, ya know). It was a bit like Love Actually, in that it had all sorts of different plots with characters that were somewhat connected. I really liked Gennifer Goodwin's and Justin Long's plot. And Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck (although not my favorite actors) were pretty sweet. The audience was really fun. We were very vocal. Everyone laughed and booed and gasped and it was quite rowdy sometimes. I really enjoyed it. We got the bus back (although we had some trouble finding our second station), which was nice--less walking in the cold! Oh! And I got to talk to Patrick on iChat, which was a nice Valentine's present, too. :)

Sunday
I finally got to sleep in! YAY! I slept in until 10am. woohoo! I spent the morning eating breakfast and finishing "volume the first" of Jane Eyre. I'm really enjoying re-reading it. To break up the day a bit, I decided to walk to the grocery store. I got a bit lost (I've never been to the one close to home before), but I didn't mind. It was nice to be out, just walking, not really caring about the time. I did finally get there (and on my way I found that restaurant that we had wanted to go to the night before! argh!). It was very big and I stocked up on a few things. Then I walked home (via a road that goes by our tube station, which will be handy to know about). I did homework and then got to iChat with mom and my sibs. :) That was fun, but dad wasn't home from basketball yet. :( I had some soup for dinner and Ros let me have some challah bread with it (yum! yum!). Then it was off to do more homework and chatting with people. I read my article for my novel seminar. It was pretty interesting, but I'll have to re-read it and take more notes, before I can completely absorb it.

Then. it. happened. My stupid computer wouldn't let me get on the Internet. I had service (full bars), but it kept saying I had no IP address or, eventually, that I had a self-assigned one and that it couldn't connect to the Internet. I have still not figured out WHY it happened and I am really freaked out that it might happen again. I sort of have it fixed for now, I guess. It's really annoying, because it's my only way to contact people back home. I was pretty upset. I stayed up until almost 2am dealing with it. Luckily, Anne let me get on her computer and Tom Dickson gave me some tech support while I tried to puzzle it out. grrr. I'm just glad that night is over with.