My, it's been an "interesting" weekend. Friday, The Wife was supposed to have a client meeting down by Hyde Park and wanted to get a rental car. I found, once again, that the only Enterprise honoring the "$9.99/day" weekend promo was to-Hell-and-gone out on the NW Side, so I took the El up to Belmont and the Belmont bus all the way out to Cicero to get to the location. When I got there, they had NO "cars" but plenty of pick-up trucks, and a few SUVs ... I opted to take an SUV (which would have typically cost us a huge daily rate) for the $9.99/day special.
Over the past couple of weeks we've had some "equipment failures" around here, with the "most desperate" being the microwave going wonky (we assumed that spewing ozone is NOT a good thing for the oven to be doing!), so I figured having a vehicle would help on that. Lucky for us, Sears was having a 50% off sale on a big microwave, and I was able to walk out of there with the microwave and a DVD/VCR combo player (to replace one that The Girls had managed to screw up) for a total, with tax, of $152 ... I do love getting a deal!
A week or so back, the Tribune had an article about "strange candy" from various world cultures that were available in the Chicago market. One of the things they mentioned was a goat-milk caramel which was available at this chain of Mexican sweet shops, Dulcelandia. Now, one of my all-time favorite candies is this thing I'd had all those times I'd been down in Mexico ... I knew them as "Sevillanas", but I guess they're more generically known as "Oblea Cajeta" ... they're a dollop of sweet sticky goat-milk caramel stuck between two (communion-style) wafers. I went to the Dulcelandia site and discovered (oh, joy!) that they did, indeed, carry these ... unfortunately (being the cheap bastard that I am), I could just not "pull the trigger" on the order due to very high shipping costs. I did, however, discover that they had a location around Fullerton & Pulaski, which (while being far enough west to make it quite an expedition to get there by bus), was only a mile or so from where I was picking up the car! So, I was able to both get my candy fix and get Fabulous Deals on equipment even before I got the vehicle home. This ended up being a Good Thing, as while I was out, The Wife's appointment (for which, of course, we were investing in a car rental in the first place) called to re-schedule for next week.
Another "could have been momentus" thing was showing my Mom's apartment. The real estate gal we have working with us (although she's not started officially showing the place yet) said that she had a couple that was looking for a unit in my Mom's building that they were going to gut out and re-do (so the fact that things are still a mess over there didn't much matter). They had "lost" a unit on the 18th floor and were quite motivated to find another 3-bedroom in the building ... they'd looked at one on the 8th floor, but didn't like how it looked right out on the roofs of the townhouses across the street ... my Mom's place is on the 11th floor, and clears that. Unfortunately, they also did not like looking at the airconditioning units of the Esquire Theater which is a block due south (which is a "feature" of the veiw from my Mom's place) ... however, the Esquire has been sold to a developer, and in the next year or two it will be replaced with a mid-rise mix-use development. The real estate gal had another gal from her office with her, and she has an "in" with the developer in question, and will be digging up what info she can about timing and plans for that location. IF she finds something which would be to the liking of this couple, we'll probably have the sale done! While I'm not "holding my breath", it would be sweet to not have to go through that whole showing-the-apartment process!
