are french fries a "vegetable"?

My performance review on Friday went very well. I haven’t been with the company long enough to qualify for an actual promotion, but they do these evaluations at the end of every fiscal year (which is now). And despite the fact that I’ve only been there 5 months, I am getting a raise of $1,000 a year. The way it was explained to me is that it’s kind of an incentive, like they think I’m doing a good job and want me to keep it up. I figure that after taxes, I might see an extra $50 a month. So that’s 1/2 of one student loan payment. Or 1/6th of a car payment. Or some insanely small fraction of rent. Regardless, it’s extra money, so I’m certainly not going to complain about it.

Now for the weekend summary. Friday was my own private chill-out night. I needed to recover from my Thursday night out with my co-workers, and Dave was having a boys’ night with one of his friends, so I cleaned my apartment and did laundry. Very exciting. Saturday, Dave and I were supposed to go to a bonfire at his neighbor’s house, but the poor guy (Dave, not his neighbor) apparently gave himself food poisoning by eating way-too-old leftovers, so that sort of scrapped those plans. I decided to go to the supermarket because I was out of a lot of stuff, and I totally forgot about the Jesus show going on less than 2 blocks away at Key Arena. I’m not sure if it was just ending or just beginning when I headed out to the store, but the Christian ladies were *everywhere*. Honestly, I have never seen so many unattractive women in one place in my life. Everywhere I looked were overweight middle-aged women in ugly JC Penney’s clothes with bad haircuts and minimal make-up. It was scary as hell. I didn’t want to walk to Blockbuster and have to navigate myself through the Throngs of Ugliness, so I decided that I was going to stay in and watch HBO. I got home, turned on the TV, and…. nothing. My cable was out. I called the cable company, and the automated voice message told me that there was a “known outage” in my area. I had a suspicion that it had something to do with the Christian women’s rally (maybe my cable signal was scared of all of the cellulite clad in unnatural fibers), but of course I couldn’t prove it. So I called Krissy to see if she wanted to go out (sort of a last-ditch desparate effort), but she had a date. Damn. So instead, I watched old episodes of “Sex & the City” on tape, then played GameBoy for a few hours. Not exactly a rockin’ Saturday night, I must say.

Yesterday, Dave and I went shopping, which translates to: he shopped, I whined. I wasn’t feeling well, and I tried to be a good sport, but it just wasn’t working too well for me. I felt better after we ate, then we rented “Super-Size Me” and watched that. Good lord. I already knew the stuff about McDonald’s, but the part about the food that’s being served in school cafeterias was absolutely horrifying. It’s amazing that we don’t all die of coronaries before we turn 25. I’ve never really considered doing the whole organic diet thing, but that movie made me think about it. Maybe that’s the point.

Ooh, and tomorrow morning, Dave’s gorgeous new furniture arrives! Hooray!!