Since I was going to spend my birthday in the bitter cold alone, I decided to go all out this weekend and eat away the pain. Since it happened to be Restaurant Week, I was able to join a few co-fellows for foodie outings on Saturday. For lunch, we went to Tallula’s in Chapel Hill for Turkish pide and lentil soup. Dinner was in the same area, so I stayed at nearby Caffe Driade for a tall cup of hot chocolate while reading my pile of journal articles in lieu of paying for WiFi. Dinner at Il Palio was respectable classic Italian – minestrone, tagliatelle bolognese, and creme brulee, which interestingly was served in a puffed pastry. My binge continued into Sunday, when I tackled the Food Truck Rodeo. Having researched ahead of time, I beelined to the notable stars among the 30 or so participants, downing a quintuplet of juicy buns at Chirba Chirba, a fried green tomato burger with pimento cheese and fried egg at Only Burger, and a “pigs & figs” grilled cheese sandwich (sourdough + goat cheese + speck + figs + balsamic = yummy) at American Meltdown. Satiated, I was pleasantly surprised by another present back home – it’s my captain’s chair! As it turns out, the rocker, a graduation gift courtesy of the MEEI Alumni Association, comes pre-assembled in a giant box that does not fit inside my car in any orientation. I ended up strapping it to the passenger front seat with the door wide opened which made for a precarious drive back in the midst of a sleet storm. Fortunately, the layer of ice let me slide the box back to my apartment with ease. Meanwhile, I also received my new desktop monitor this week. After shipping my previous monitor back and forth three times in a month, Samsung’s repair center finally threw in the towel. But since the company no longer make 30″ monitors, they could only offer a refund with 70% depreciation! Understandingly, I was a little bitter having to chip in another $200 to downgrade to a Dell 27″. The new monitor arrived just in time before the impending demise of Live Mesh, as I migrate my sync folders to Skydrive. Microsoft, why hath thou forsaken peer-to-peer sync?!