I have the program, as well as the Living It Up expansion pack. It was purchased some time ago, and I thought it might be something fun to do when Elvis worked late. But since we moved here, he's been getting home at a somewhat normal time, so I've never even installed it. Yes, I know the rest of the world has been playing with their Sims for years. I've never claimed to be hip and up to date and all that.

But, hey, Elvis started going in late, and working late, last week. So when Friday night rolled around, I figured it was as good a time as any to break out the Sims and see what they would get up to. I even bought them Hot Date, to help ensure that it would be something interesting.

So I installed the first disk. I messed around with the Newbie family because, yes, I believe in RFM. Then Norton wanted to do its Friday night scan, so I left it to it while I went to get something to eat.

Norton never finished. It couldn't.

Seems I ran out of memory.

I was flabbergasted. Tony's got a five gig hard drive. At the risk of sounding like a less geeky version of Uncle Bill, how much memory does one really need? Toby had less than one. OK, so I managed to use it all up after a couple of years, but still. Five gig, that's lots and lots, right?

Apparently not.

The very idea made Pooka Boy giggle when Elvis and I went out later on. And it turns out that when Elvis' hard drive died last June, they upgraded him to 18 gigs because they didn't have the same, smaller hard drive in stock because no one wants one that small anymore. He thinks the old one had ten gigs or so.

Now I've got memory envy, on top of it all.

And my Y key is sticking, for no apparent reason. I doubt it's related, but I'm just saying.

So Elvis spent Saturday sleeping off Friday night, and I spend the day cleaning up my hard drive which was almost as fun as it sounds. How were my Sims going to Live Large, much less go on Hot Dates, if I didn't? Hells bells, I couldn't even get Norton to do its virus scan, and that kind of thing is damn important, no?

And defragmenting? Screw that, there's not enough room. Still isn't, although I managed to delete some other programs, zip some stuff up, and uninstall my poor Sims today, so I'll give it another try tonight.

It's truly amazing how much junk was on here. All sorts of things I didn't even know were there, that came pre-installed. Fifty mb was being wasted just by a "free" opportunity to install MSN, for example. Actually, I thought I'd already uninstalled that one. Guess not. And Quicken 2000 (Deluxe Edition, natch): what's up with that?

By Saturday night, I was feeling pretty testy. Elvis refused to leave the couch, so I went out on a mini pub crawl with Pooka Boy, Sir, and Miss Kitty. MK's been having a pretty rough time of it lately, so she needed some cheering up. Of course, it was past eleven when I left, so I didn't expect it to be an early night. Elvis was inspired to take a shower after I left, discovered he didn't feel so bad after all, and joined us three bars later. We got home before five, which wasn't too bad, considering.

Sunday afternoon, we went to Peniche for a late lunch because, dammit, we rented the damn car and we needed to get some use out of it. Peniche was depressing and deserted, and the fact that it was threatening to rain didn't help at all. A beach and harbor sort of town wasn't such a good choice, in retrospect. So we left without eating lunch, and took the slow road back toward Lisbon.

We stopped in at Lourinha. It has a pretty, pedestrianized center, a sixteenth century church, an very jolly looking statue of Pope John XXIII, and a lot of dinosaurs. Apparently, it's the dinosaur center of Portugal, with one of the best collections of dinosaur related stuff in Europe. They're pulling up dinosaur bones like they were potatoes around there. Who knew?

We stopped in Lourinha because it was the first town where we saw actual people out and about. There were a bunch of old guys in cardigans and flat caps lounging around in the little square outside the church, and people were spilling out of the bar on the corner onto the sidewalk.

It turned out, unfortunately, that the corner cafe was so popular because it was the only one open. So, after a short stroll round the town center, we hopped back into our car and followed our very empty stomachs to Torres Vedras.

Torres Vedras is interesting because of the Torres, oddly enough. These are a series of forts built by Wellington to protect Lisbon, and thus all of Portugal, from Napoleon. And when I say "built by Wellington", I really mean "he hired a bunch of Portuguese peasants, and set them to work for a year." In secret, which was pretty clever of him, as it flummoxed Massena when he finally showed up. He dithered for a while, hanging about until the good guys showed up, forcing him into a retreat that didn't stop until he hit Tolouse.

You can't really see the Lines of Torres Vedras, as they're called, these days, as they tend to be falling down, and the trenches are filling in. Apparently you can hike along the lines, though, but we really didn't care. It was approaching dinner hour, and all we really cared to see was something, preferably warm, on a plate. There is the ruin of a thirteenth century castle up on the hill, but we ignored that as well. Instead, we took a stroll through the (larger and pretty nice) pedestrianized downtown district. Everything was pretty much closed at that point, if it had ever been open, but there were people out walking around and such. Finally, we found a cervejaria called O Gordo, or Fatso's in English.

We've found it usually to be a good idea to eat at places called Fatso's, and this was no exception. Plain, tavern style food made by two rotund woman you could watch bustle around in the tiny kitchen, plus a big guy manning the rotisserie and a small grill. They seem to do a big business in chicken, at least half of it take-out.

Elvis had half a chicken and french fries, which he loved. I don't like chicken (my mother's spent most of her life torturing them, and I pretty much stopped eating them at the age of eighteen, when I left home for the University), so I had a fried egg with something described as garlic sausage. The fried egg was cooked perfectly runny and a bit crispy on the bottom. The garlic sausage was huge, about the size of an entire ring bologna. It also appeared to be breaded, which immediately made my arteries quiver in fear. What it turned out to be was a sort of stuffing, if that's the right word, very moist and generously studded with shreds of smoked pork and beef. Somehow, they managed to make it into a sausage ring shape, and fried it until corn-dog crisp.

It was fabulous.

I ate the whole thing. My arteries can go stuff themselves. My only regret is that there wasn't another egg: two would have been perfect. It came with a huge mound of greasy french fries (which Elvis polished off, I was too busy eating the sausage thingy to pay too much attention to them), about a cup of rice seasoned with something I couldn't quite make out (all that garlic in the sausage, but it tasted good), and a small pile of shredded carrots on a slice of tomato and lettuce leaf (because a gal's gotta have some vegetables in her life). I completely ignored the salad, but I did have soup to start. Fairly standard Portuguese vegetable soup, heavy on the cabbage and beans. Which is just as well, since my system was going to need all the help it could get moving all that fatty stuff through the ramshackle temple that is my body and out the back door.

I want another one. Immediately. Honestly, if we had a car, I'd make Elvis drive me there Right Now, or as soon as he gets home from work. So what if the place is on top of a mountain, and reachable only by narrow, twisty roads? Shouldn't take us more than an hour. And I can't go out an buy one for myself, as I tragically forgot to write down its name before we left.

I just need to make sure to have some soup, because, not to put too fine a point on it, it did its job quite well.