birthday weekend

Ken turned 28 yesterday! He wanted a relaxing weekend, since every other weekend has been so busy, and that's what he got. Michael came into town for the weekend to help Ken with his relaxing activities in celebration of his birthday, and here he is starting off the weekend right.

We did a lot of eating and watching movies on Friday night and on Saturday morning we did a quick walk to Jefferson Park with the dog. I am in love with this park and this view right now.

Saturday night we had ourselves a little birthday grub at Richmond's ultimate soul food spot, Croaker's Spot. My mouth is watering and my stomach is grumbling as I write this. This place is so popular on the weekends that there's always a line, and when we got there the wait was 30-45 minutes. We avoided the wait by carrying out, and it was a much shorter wait.

This is crazy good soul food, people. Huge portions, good seafood, blocks of cornbread, cheese grits, stewed cabbage...oh so good. We usually have their fried seafood dishes, but this time both Ken and I went with the broiled dishes and we were quite happy. Ken got broiled scallop and shrimp, and I got the broiled trout with mushroom in lemon garlic sauce. My goodness, it was scrumptious. I wanted to give everyone a hug while I was eating it.

For Ken's present, not only did he get the grooviest socks in the world from yours truly, but he also got himself/us computer parts from our tax refund to build a computer himself. We've been talking about needing a desktop for a while now for various things (plus my mac is on its last dying breath), so in order to help cut expenses, he decided to build one! K did a lot of research and then also Joey happened to be around to help. After a few hours, voila!


All the parts




It's so fascinating to know all the parts that go into making a computer work!




This is the inside look of the system unit in its case, almost finished. Isn't it incredible!
I was very impressed.

On Sunday, there was church, a run to Jefferson park, Ken's volleyball practice, and then more volleyball at night. (My womens' team had our tournament games that night, and even though two of our players were missing, and we didn't go as far as we would have liked, we put in good time and it was a fun season!) One of the parents on Ken's boys' team put together a happy birthday hurrah for the end of practice with snacks and this incredible cake. I don't have a picture of the cake in its original form, but it had a big volleyball in the middle. It was a giant sized homemade red velvet cake, and it was amaazing. Here is a picture of what was left of it. It was a pretty delicious way to end the weekend.

Happy 28th birthday my love!