daidoji_gisei (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
daidoji_gisei) wrote2013-03-02 10:18 pm
daidoji_gisei) wrote2013-03-02 10:18 pm
Entry tags:
Travelin' Saturday
I spent a very large fraction of today either shopping or waiting for a bus. It was odd.
At the root of it all was my flex account, and the fact that I still had multiple hundreds of dollars left from 2012 in it: I (QUITE HAPPILY) managed to not have any emergency room visits last year, so I needed to find a way to use that money up. Since I wear glasses, this isn't hard.
I went to my eye doctor place and ordered my first ever prescription sunglasses. They are polaroids with spiffy metal aviator-style frames and, since I was burning up money, I also got the mirror finish that makes people see themselves, and not your eyes, when they look at the lenses. The mirror finish serves no purpose other than looking cool, and I decided that I could afford to pay a little extra for some cool. It will also make them take longer to arrive, as it was explained to me that there is only one lab in the US that can apply the finish. My glasses will be ground in one lab, then shipped to the mirrorshade lab, and then finally back to my eye doctor's place. A well-traveled pair of specs!
Sunglasses will be nice. Up until my current pair of glasses I had always gotten photograys, but for that pair I needed to get bifocals (this was not a surprise, believe me) and having sprung for the fancy transitional grind I decided to skip the photograys. I spent the last summer wedded to wide-brimmed hats, and though I don't object to this a pair of sunglasses will give me options.
And hey, mirrorshades!
After ordering the glasses I wandered around the shopping malls in the area, seeing if any of the shops had viable paper/notebooks for various and sundry purposes. They didn't, but I did find a few balls of interesting yarns at Tuesday Morning. One ball of yarn is useless if you are the kink of crocheter who does afghans or sweaters, but since I have the crochet version of ADD I never do stuff like that. One ball of yarn is a purse, or a hat, or a whole bunch of flowers--I have lots of patterns that use smallish yarn quantities. Cleaning up my living room so that I could host my game has had the beneficial effect of giving me a comfortable place to sit and crochet, so I've been doing more of that recently.
Next came grocery shopping, where I picked up such exciting things as fresh broccoli, almonds, and laundry detergent. The bus was really, really late and I missed the downtown connection to get home. Here the Saturday busses run hourly (SOB! our public transit is so bad in this town) so I had 40 minutes until the next bus home. If the weather had been nicer or my groceries less heavy I would have just walked home (it's about 20 minutes from downtown to my place), but I was feeling wimpy so instead I went to the library and checked out a whole bunch of music CDs. My haul was evenly divided between a large number of Holst recordings (a few different performances of the Planets, plus some of his other compositions) and an equal number of blues/rock artists. (If the public library computer has achieved sentience it surely suspects that two entirely different people are using my library card to check things out.)
I finally got home, at which point I collapsed for awhile, then wrote out the beginning-of-the-month bills and then walked to the nearest postal box and mailed them. That and three loads of laundry were the only house-worky things I got done, but it couldn't be helped. I got things that needed to be done, done, and let that be enough.
At the root of it all was my flex account, and the fact that I still had multiple hundreds of dollars left from 2012 in it: I (QUITE HAPPILY) managed to not have any emergency room visits last year, so I needed to find a way to use that money up. Since I wear glasses, this isn't hard.
I went to my eye doctor place and ordered my first ever prescription sunglasses. They are polaroids with spiffy metal aviator-style frames and, since I was burning up money, I also got the mirror finish that makes people see themselves, and not your eyes, when they look at the lenses. The mirror finish serves no purpose other than looking cool, and I decided that I could afford to pay a little extra for some cool. It will also make them take longer to arrive, as it was explained to me that there is only one lab in the US that can apply the finish. My glasses will be ground in one lab, then shipped to the mirrorshade lab, and then finally back to my eye doctor's place. A well-traveled pair of specs!
Sunglasses will be nice. Up until my current pair of glasses I had always gotten photograys, but for that pair I needed to get bifocals (this was not a surprise, believe me) and having sprung for the fancy transitional grind I decided to skip the photograys. I spent the last summer wedded to wide-brimmed hats, and though I don't object to this a pair of sunglasses will give me options.
And hey, mirrorshades!
After ordering the glasses I wandered around the shopping malls in the area, seeing if any of the shops had viable paper/notebooks for various and sundry purposes. They didn't, but I did find a few balls of interesting yarns at Tuesday Morning. One ball of yarn is useless if you are the kink of crocheter who does afghans or sweaters, but since I have the crochet version of ADD I never do stuff like that. One ball of yarn is a purse, or a hat, or a whole bunch of flowers--I have lots of patterns that use smallish yarn quantities. Cleaning up my living room so that I could host my game has had the beneficial effect of giving me a comfortable place to sit and crochet, so I've been doing more of that recently.
Next came grocery shopping, where I picked up such exciting things as fresh broccoli, almonds, and laundry detergent. The bus was really, really late and I missed the downtown connection to get home. Here the Saturday busses run hourly (SOB! our public transit is so bad in this town) so I had 40 minutes until the next bus home. If the weather had been nicer or my groceries less heavy I would have just walked home (it's about 20 minutes from downtown to my place), but I was feeling wimpy so instead I went to the library and checked out a whole bunch of music CDs. My haul was evenly divided between a large number of Holst recordings (a few different performances of the Planets, plus some of his other compositions) and an equal number of blues/rock artists. (If the public library computer has achieved sentience it surely suspects that two entirely different people are using my library card to check things out.)
I finally got home, at which point I collapsed for awhile, then wrote out the beginning-of-the-month bills and then walked to the nearest postal box and mailed them. That and three loads of laundry were the only house-worky things I got done, but it couldn't be helped. I got things that needed to be done, done, and let that be enough.