What a lovely weekend! My head is still all full of the happy-fuzz you get when life has been treating you with especial kindness.

I had plans for the weekend, but they all fell through--neither Meghan nor I were able to convince ourselves that we had the money to afford a trip to a 'show' featuring fancy and exotic handmade yarns. The Argonuts were supposed to have a belated summer picnic, but no one signed up so it was canceled in favor of an in-office party this coming Friday.

Although I had enough "chores" on my list to fill a weekend-and-a-half, I tossed most of them out the window in favor of getting out and soaking up some late summer sunshine. The weather was fabulous, and the shopping equally glorious.

I'm not the world's girliest girl when it comes to shoes--I favor sturdy black trouser shoes with a 1" heel and comfy, shock-absorbing rubber soles. When I'm feeling wild-and-crazy, I go to a 1-1/4" heel. Granted, I need a pair of "dress" shoes for the formal occasions this company has on occasion, but a pair of nice, black pumps would have been perfectly appropriate.

Would have been. Because I do have my girly moments. This weekend, my inner diva came out and demanded that I buy her a pair of black velvet sandals decorated with black sequins and 2" spike heels.

I may and/or may not be able to actually walk in them, but who cares when I feel so pretty? (I'll take a picture of them later and post it up for the girly-girls amongst us.)

Then, on to a clothing store where I was tempted by two shirts. I'm going to wait until payday rolls around again. Then I'll go back and try them on and see if I really like them or not.

After that, off to the bookstore, where I showed amazing restraint. I bought only one book, and that was from the bargain shelves. I paid $8 for a cookbook offering "Easy Tapas Recipes." Poring over it Saturday evening, I found myself marking 15-20 recipes that both looked easy enough for my skills and seemed to use ingredients I either like or suspect I'd like. I'm a big nibbler, so the idea of having ingredients around to make 5-6 kinds of tapas for dinner any random evening is very appealing to me.

Less appealing? The realization that the food won't be as good if I substitute canned/frozen ingredients for some of the fresh ingredients they mention. I live across the street from Whole Foods, though, and any ingredient they can't supply, I can't imagine needing.

And, speaking of Whole Foods.... There's a Chinese restaurant across the street from where I live. The R.C. and I had been talking about trying it for the last year and this weekend we finally remembered and gave them a call. She tried the almond chicken and I tried the garlic beef and the double pan-fried noodles with chicken.

It was--eh. Okay if you dump a lot of soy sauce on it. Unremarkable otherwise, except that the portions were enormous. The R.C. divided her chicken into 4 meals. My two entrees made six meals.

The point of the story being that by dinnertime Sunday, I was in search of something other than Chinese food for dinner, so we walked over to Whole Foods where I bought some very ripe Early Girl tomatoes (for a recipe I want to try this evening) and some fabulous roasted pepper dip.

I tried the dip out as spread for a ham sandwich with mixed results. I think it was the ham's fault, though. It (the dip) would be great with fresh veggies, but I don't have any of those.

I'm thinking there were a couple of the tapas recipes that called for some kind of roasted red pepper ingredient, so maybe I can use it there.

Whole Foods also had these fascinating, bite-sized pita pockets that I wanted rather badly--just the thing for many of those tapas recipes, but I couldn't convince myself that I'd be able to eat half of them before they got rock-hard.

*Sigh.* I can't even get a head of lettuce eaten before it goes weird. The only simple way to cook for one person is to heat up a tv dinner.

Lemmee see....I'm sure there was more. I got the ironing done and most of the laundry done and the bathroom cleaned and some mending (hemming some too-long t-shirts) started but not finished, but those aren't exciting.

I dunno. Looking back on it, I'm vague as to how I spent the rest of the weekend, but I know I had a really good time.

It wasn't a bit nice to wake up this morning and discover that it was 47 degrees in my bedroom (I slept with the window open) and that it was time and past time for me to roll out of bed and take myself off to my Monday morning job duties.