Sundays!

When I started my job at the store, I asked my manager for Sunday mornings off so that I could go to church. For a long time, he didn't schedule me on Sundays at all, but then we lost a few partners in the summer-to-fall shuffle, including several people with Sunday availability. So I started working Sunday evenings.

I didn't really mind, since that was the availability I had given my boss, but after a few weeks of working Sunday nights, I began to mourn the loss of an entire day that I always never had to work. It's a really nice concept; kudos to whoever came up with that. (Oh yeah, God.)

So my manager did a bit of shuffling, hired some new people, and now I don't have to work Sundays anymore. What a blessing to work for people who will do stuff like that for you. Yesterday was the first of my new Sabbaths.

So, after an excellent church service (one that left me really thinking for the second time in two weeks - thanks, pastor), I invited a new friend from church, Dan, to come over for homemade chicken soup. Jeremy and I had eaten rotisserie chicken for dinner the night before, which meant that there was a big bowl of tasty, fresh broth waiting in the fridge to be properly soupified. We made soup, and even threw in some of those flamboyantly multicolored pasta bowties that Sarah brought me back from Italy. It was tasty, and fun, and we rounded the afternoon out with some video games.

Dan had to leave, but his place was soon taken by Phil and Rachel and, eventually, Jon. We had planned on watching a movie or two, but we instead became enthralled by watching Jon's white wolf run around painting things with his celestial paintbrush. That ended up occupying most of the evening, except that part where we got hungry and Rachel and I (chaperoned by Phil, who was hungry and wanted to make sure we didn't shop for too long) headed to the brand new Wegmans to buy something for dinner. For those of you who don't live in a Wegmans-serviced area, it's an awesome grocery store that is open 24 hours, and offers everything from customer education to a kosher deli to banking. And they just opened one up not too far from me! :)

We ended up buying thin strips of top round steak, deli-sliced provolone cheese, and fresh sour dough baguettes with which to make the fancy, French restaurant version of Philly cheese steaks. We also wandered a wee bit more than we should, and bought many things that were on sale, and dallied in the bulk section until Phil had to bodily remove us to the checkout line. Then I ripped the back of my knuckles off trying to put something on the conveyer belt and took my bloodied hand to the customer service desk where the slightly-over-helpful clerk insisted on not just giving me a band-aid, but opening and placing it for me as well.

Dinner was tasty, and Rachel and I surreptitiously made brownies while everyone else was distracted by a game of bridge. It was fun to surprise everyone else with an elaborate dessert of brownie sundaes with ice cream and strawberries (and whipped cream and chocolate syrup) a little bit later when all that video-game watching had made us peckish. We also played a game or two of Cranium Whoonu, which was fun but over too fast and probably won't have an overly high replay value, since all the cards are so similar. (Basically, it's like Apples to Apples without the context of the adjective - you just turn in whichever card you think someone else will like best, and they rank them in order of preference. I think it would be more fun if it had bad things in the deck: Which do you like more, nazis or the ebola virus?)

All in all a fun evening, although Jon had to go home before he beat the thief Hayazo, because he'll need to learn an electricity brush stroke of some sort before coming back. If this game is so addictive to watch, it's probably a good thing I don't own it to play myself. You might never see me again, because why blog when there are kimonos to paint?