So as the title says, I am now back from the beach, which is where I was since a week ago yesterday.  We went to the outer banks in NC.  First time I have ever been there, it was pretty nice, but not my favorite of the beaches I have been to.  The plusses include that the beach wasn’t crowded, we had a nice big house rented, due to several of the extended fam coming as well.  At said house, we had a private pool/hot tub, both of which were quite nice.  I hate having to share hot tubs with people I don’t know, so it was good to be able to just use it as much as I wanted throughout the week.  I miss it already.

Anyway, more on that later I suppose.  The wednesday before we left was Holly’s birthday.  It started with me having not had a chance to get her present yet due to putting it off till the day before and then not having time to the day before.  So, I intended to get it before she woke up….  unfortunately, she woke up before I could go to the store (the store in question, Costco, does not open until 10, so I was waiting for that.)  Anyway, I was checking my e-mail, when I noted that Holly had sent me an add request on Ringo (which I have never used and didn’t remember even signing up for, but that is beside the point.)  Upon seeing that, I noted the time it was sent, which was that morning… thus I knew she was awake before leaving my room.  So I came downstairs as stealthily as possible to see if she was still in her room and if I could slip out.  However, she was not, and was in fact in the bathroom.  So I decided to leave her a note very quickly on her macbook since I knew I’d probably be gone for an hour.  I went into her room, grabbed the computer, and opened Microsoft Word.  Now, for some reason (I think probably due to not being shut down for quite awhile, though I also ran disk repair on it and it found some things that needed fixing) the computer had been running slow.  I was not really aware of it at the time though… but seriously…  Word took FOREVER to boot up.  I thought she might come out of the bathroom and ruin my plan, but I waited and finally it came up.  I quickly typed the message (I think I did pretty good, only one typo if I remember correctly from when I looked at it upon my return).  I said something to the effect of “Happy birthday, I’m not here right now, but I’ll be back soon.  Why don’t you go ahead and get ready for the day?”.  So then I left and drove to Costco.  The gift in question, for those of you who might be wondering, was a Nintendo DS Lite.  I knew she had kind of wanted one, and was previously planning on getting her a bike, until my mom revealed that her old one was still in good condition, and smaller then her current bike (which we found out when we went riding one day, is too tall for Holly.)  Anyway, she said Holly could have the old bike, so I decided that better for her to have a bike and something else then just a bike.

So I got the DS, then proceeded over to Gamestop to look for a game.  Initially, I was trying to locate a copy of Animal Crossing, which Holly had expressed interest in, but upon taking the case to the counter, the guy said they were sold out.  So I decided on The Sims 2 (which I was not sure of, but has turned out to be a good choice… she played it quite a lot while at the beach).  Next up was something to deter her for awhile….  though certainly something that I knew she would like.  I stopped at Bloom (formerly Food Lion, for those who don’t know) and picked up a dozen roses.  At this point I had taken a little longer then I expected… I think it had been almost an hour and a half in total.  The only question was what to do with the gift.. I didn’t have time to wrap it, nor did I know where any wrapping paper was.  So I decided the easiest thing to do was to leave it in the car, because she was expecting to go somewhere anyway.  I took the roses in with me, and knocked on her bedroom door, and surprised her with those.  She asked where I had been, and I said I had to take care of some things, and asked if she was ready to go yet.  “almost”, of course, was her reply. 😉  So she continued to get ready, we requested of my mom to cut the roses and place them in a vase, and then we “left.”

Of course, she knew something was up, but, we got to the car, and I opened her door for her, and as she was about to get in she saw the DS and game sitting on the seat and she was quite surprised. So we went back inside so that she could put them away and plug in the DS so it would be charged for play later.  Then we were back to the car to leave for real.

Our destination was supposed to be a surprise, but she got me to tell her that if she guessed right, I would tell her.  Her first guess was right, Dutch’s Daughter.  We got there, had lunch, which was very good.  I had a bowl of the cream of crab soup, and salmon.  She had a cup of cream of crab soup, and some kind of vegetable cheese bread that looked pretty good.  So after getting quite full there, we had decided it would be a good day to go to the inner harbor, as she had wanted to for quite some time but the last time people went she was horribly tired due to being out late the night before and then having to wake up early and work that day.  So we went home to do…. something, I can’t remember what.  Then off to the Inner Harbor.

We walked around to all the shops, sat on the edge of the harbor over behind the Rusty Scupper, and did all the basic things one does at the inner harbor.  we sat to watch the magician at the little street performer place…  and i was quickly chosen to help with a trick… pretty basic… he had a closed deck of cards (in the box).  He had one person choose a color, black or red, (red was chosen), one person choose a suite, hearts or diamonds (hearts was chosen), and then had me choose a card, 2 thru Ace (I chose Jack).  He then took out the cards and said one of the cards in the deck was upside down, he flayed them out and found it, then had me come up and remove it and show it to everyone, of course, it was the Jack of hearts.  Pretty good trick I guess, couldn’t figure out how he did it really.

Anyway, we were there about 3 hours in total, ate some cheese fries from Johnny Rocket before leaving, and were off to back home.  I don’t remember what else we did really upon getting home, but it was fairly late, so we probably just watched some tv, ate dinner, and went to bed.

This post is long, too long.  In another day or 2 I will tell you more about birthdays and beach trips and things in between.