A Pleasant Evening

It is Southern Man's weekend with ten-year-old daughter and we have had a pleasant and not-to-overly-exciting few days. Southern Man "kidnapped" her from school (that is, checked her out a bit before lunchtime) on Friday; after lunch (Chick-Fil-A, her new favorite fast food) she saw a movie (Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief) while Southern Man took the Hyundai to the shop and waited on a necessary repair, and after some shopping and errands we ate a late dinner at Golden Corral. Mmmmm, cheap steak. On Saturday we did a few errands out at The Land (which included fetching a few boxes of DVDs from where they'd been in storage for well over a year, which made daughter quite happy), dropped by her mom's to give her seventeen-year-old sister her birthday presents (ten-year-old daughter had spent a large chunk of her allowance on gifts last visit, and her mom and I went halves on a nice new (and very purple) Dell laptop, and her mom's boyfriend fiancé sprang for the extended warranty) and led daughter's eight party guests in a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday. And then ten-year-old daughter and I spent the rest of the evening watching movies and playing card games (thanks to her grandmother she is something of a shark at gin rummy) and cooking and baking - banana bread, chocolate-chip cookies (with both store-bought and homemade cookie dough), fantasy fudge, and bean soup. The apartment is finally beginning to feel like home.