BTRIPP (btripp) wrote,
BTRIPP
btripp

Whew ...

This was one of "those weekends", with the complicating factors of it being a long weekend (both of The Girls were off for the King holiday) and The Wife had a rental car (to get to appointments far afield on Friday and Sunday). I supect that "car people" don't fully appreciate how stressful having a car is to a downtown person ... not only do you have to spend all day running out to put quarters in whatever meter you managed to find for it (most of the weekend it was at least six blocks away) every two hours, but when you're done with what you're using it for, you have to spend huge chunks of time circling and hoping for a legal spot to open up. Parking in our building is in excess of $300/month, and on a daily basis it would probably cost more than the rental itself.

I'm always amazed when people "keep cars" in the city. My Mom's best friend used to do design work and would be running around town from this showroom to that boutique picking up things for photo shoots, she'd regularly run up over a hundred bucks a day ducking into lots that were charging $11 for the first half hour. Of course, she was able to pass that along to her clients, but I can't imagine folks doing that just to go shopping!

At least I managed to get The Girls up to Dojo twice this weekend ... having just paid for a full year for both of them, I am in one of those "you're damn well going to make every class" moods! The Wife showed up today with a little drum kit for Daughter #2 (who's turning 5 in a few weeks), yet another example of "what was she thinking", as I'm sure if the kid actually plays them, that will be "an issue" and if she doesn't play them it will be a "why do we get these things for you?" deal. Sucks to be one of our kids, I guess.

Yesterday I took #2 off to Chuck E. Cheese, originally it was to get her out of the house so that #1 and The Wife could do this sewing project they'd picked up at the craft store, but #1 got invited over to a playdate and so it was a "pointless" trip over to the House of the Rat ... which was horrible due to them being in the process of remodling (all the tunnel things, which #2 would have happily disappeared into, were gone) and, of course, everybody else's kids being off for MLK day. The only decent thing about that expedition is that the KB Toys next to CEC is in the last throes of going out of business, and had a final clearance sale on where most stuff was at a 60% discount from the previous mark-down prices, and if the toy fit into an "action figure" category (which they were being pretty liberal about) you got an additional 20% discount. I let #2 "go shopping" for her birthday, and we scored a TON of cool stuff and spent all of about $25 on it (come to think of it, given all the stuff we got, we might have approached my "eBay/Pokemon target" of 1/7th of retail!). Needless to say, #2 thought that was a GREAT deal of fun.

I'm teetering on the brink of competing neuroses ... my Obsessive Compulsive self is fighting with my Very Messy (I'm not sure what sort of clinical label that has, but I suspect it's in the Schizophrenia ballpark) self over the state of the living/dining area. I am Mr. "Piles Of Stuff" Packrat, so can take a lot of clutter, but our living space looks like somebody had bombed a toy store, and I'm almost to the point where the "I have to ORGANIZE" demon comes out of the jar. The Wife, of course, wouldn't complain a bit (in stark contrast to the current state of things), but I really have to be in that zone to plow into the chaos!

On other fronts, I'm a bit worried about our El signs ... they officially "went up" yesterday, but I sort of expected to see them up before the holiday ... and I've not been seeing them on more than 1 out of 4 Brown Line rides. However, yesterday there were a lot of blank ad spaces on the train, so maybe they pulled down the old ones over the weekend and the new ones (like ours, which should have about 2 ads per train car) will go up today. I guess I won't really know until this weekend unless I make a point to go aimlessly ride the subway one of these days.

Ah, but I'm starting to blither here ... I guess I'll go away now.


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