I had my birthday six days early on Saturday night, since Mark will be in The City of Doom on Friday. I got a tripod, and some really good books, a Wait Till Your Father Gets Home DVD (or four), a cool set of fake plastic food, and a Pizza Elmo, which is one of my favorite Elmos so far.

Sunday being the hottest day of the year so far, we had also managed to plan a road trip to the hottest part of the state: the greater Rockingham-Hamlet-Laurinburg metropolitan area. That whole chunk of the state from Fayetteville south is so incredibly bleak and depressing. Rockingham and Hamlet remind me of Pixley and Los Banos in California, the former being a place where all hope seems to have vanished and the latter apparently exisiting only as a highway stopover and home to the area’s obligatory Wal-Mart Supercenter.

At least there’s a Piggly Wiggly in Hamlet, but it’s closed on Sunday. We had to visit the Food King instead. It’s a cool store, and it used to be a Piggly Wiggly (and before that, an A&P) but I was a little disturbed to note the mold growing on one of the cakes they had displayed. I was even more disturbed that the cashier didn’t really seem to care when I mentioned it to her.

We circled back through Charlotte, which is not really on the way unless you drive the way we do, and visited some friends and passed out tomatoes. We have lots of tomoatoes.

All in all, it was a good weekend.