We have been watching this behemoth arise across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe and (The Girls' favorite) Rainforest Cafe, over the past year, and they both have been quite eager to get in there. Looks familiar, doesn't it? That's because they pretty much took the original McDonalds design and pumped it up so it wouldn't look like some girlyman hamburger joint!
Well, today was Daughter #1's turn (we had to go back down there to pick up some softball equipment for her from what used to be Morrie Mages), so I managed to hit the Monster McDonalds twice in two days. Frankly, The Girls were disappointed. One, they had convinced themselves that if McDonalds was going to be building such a big place, they would surely have a playland, or at least a play area with video machines (they don't), and two, they were hoping for a continuation of various coin-operated vending things as used to be found at the old Rock & Roll McDonalds (none of this stuff either). However, if one is fond of furniture design, they have quite a collection of "design seating" from the past 50 years on the upper level, from a front area tending towards the "Barcelona Chair" look (with wireless internet) to white egg/sphere chairs (much like those of The Prisoner's ever-changing Number Two) in the back (which goes from "the 50's" on one side around a curve to the present).
By the way, Daughter #1 just missed getting a straight A ... she missed it by a single point on her Social Studies score. Go her! To celebrate, I finally got her computer working again (we were having "Microsoft issues" with upgrading from W98 to XP, but for some reason it took the new code just fine today). Frankly, most of what I did today was "put out fires" on computers, The Wife somehow decided it would be a good idea to open a zip file attached to a blank e-mail and infected our main system with the damn Bagel worm which took me a half dozen attempts to completely dig out of XP. For a whille the virus warning kept popping up whenever we moved between profiles in XP, but I think (HOPE) that it's gone now. I also managed to get our out-going e-mail working (I know, just in time for some damn worm to hijack our mail functions!) on that system, after about a month of it inexplicably not being able to send. I also had a crash on my "old" system, resulting in it rebooting in Safe Mode, resulting in it scrambling up the nearly 100 icons I had carefully arranged there. Once I had that "tidied up" (I dropped a lot of things into folders), it really didn't feel like "my system" anymore ... which may, more than anything else, get me over the hump of moving stuff onto the "new" system.
Tomorrow is gong to be a nightmare, thanks to "random scheduling" by The Wife ... not only does she have to get a car crack of dawn (which she hasn't even reserved yet) for a morning appointment, but she has ME running The Girls up to assorted doctors appointments, requiring my pulling them out of school mid-day, and at least one of which is not "really set up" yet! When I asked "oh, are we then blowing off #2's soccer class?" I was told "of course not!", which means that, I'm probably going to be in one of those "fun" situations of having to be three miles from point A with five minutes to get there from point B, several times tomorrow. Bleh. Do you think she could have at least warned me about this before this evening? Double Bleh. Days like tomorrow really make me with I'd never quit drinking!