~Sunday~ I slept way in this morning. Oh glorious weekend.
I participated in my Sunday morning ritual of coffee, breakfast, country gospel music, and perusing the week’s PostSecrets. Aside: What’s the difference between a “ritual” and a “habit?” The difference is intention.
I think this secret was the richest, purely in terms of the issues it illuminates about its author:
Here are a few issues that come to my mind:
- Believing in a God that “keeps you” fat
- Not taking responsibility for your own actions
- Thinking that acting on your “homosexual urges” is a bad thing
- That you are denying your sexuality to begin with.
I took a break from the gym and the lake today.
Late afternoon, I rode out to the Crossroads shopping center, where I stopped into AC Moore to look for a frame for my Scrabble art work. They had a choice of three ready-made 12″ x 12″ frames, and when I asked the guy working in the frames department if there were any others, he tried to talk me into having a custom frame made.
After keying in way too many options I cared to have to decide on about a frame, or pay for—one that came to $55 and two that priced out in the $75-$80 range, I thanked him for his time, and bought the one of the three ready-made ones that I liked the best. At home, framed, it looked perfectly fine—I’d go so far as to say handsome—in that one at one-third the price, thank you.
My next stop was at the Super Target there, where I once again, forgot to use a gift card that I have for the place. Grrrrrr.
For dinner, I had that Pepperoni Stromboli that we got yesterday at Two Guys, but didn’t eat at all. I added one slice of jalapeño to each bite. Yum. Yum. Yum.
I spent about an hour-and-a-half backing up the My Documents folder of my laptop, specifically to get a new snapshot of the My Music (my iTunes library) and the My Pictures folder, for two reasons:
- My Thinkpad has been “acting up” lately, and I’m afraid it’s “on the verge.” It’s quite old.
- I wanted to delete—entirely—the My Pictures folder, as it had over 6 GB of pictures in it, and I’m down to the last 2 GB of available space, which I think is contributing to some of the recent problems my laptop’s been experiencing.
I backed up those folders to my external hard drive, and then made a copy of the pictures directory from the hard drive onto my desktop machine, which is also old, but is not having any space issues at all. Feels good to have that taken care of.
Then I deleted that folder on my laptop and the recovery of 6+ GB of space seems to have helped tremendously.
I waffled about going out tonight, but in the end rode down to Flex to check out scareyoke.
At about 10:00 at night, riding down Hillsborough Street and after passing through the roundabout at Morgan Street, I could see movement ahead off to the right of the road.
It turned out to be two college-aged students, one guy and one girl, on bikes with dark clothing on, no lights (front or back), or even any kind of reflectors on, and no helmets. And just for shits and giggles, the guy was riding stiffly erect (and not in a good way) with his arms folded on his chest.
I was glad to be past them, but I hit two red lights after that, which allowed them to catch up with me. I was the third person in line at the red light at the Glenwood Avenue intersection, and they came barreling past me, the guy’s hands still not on his handle bars, and neither rider slowing down in the slightest.
If the light wouldn’t have turned green just as they got to the front stopped car (the guy on the left side of the car, the girl on the right side of it), they would have gone flying through that intersection with the light red in our direction. Once in front of that front car, the guy zipped across in front of it to join his friend on the right side of the road.
I passed them once again and turning right onto West Street, I could see them coming up full speed behind me to the right, and they were so close to me already that if I’d’ve had to stop at all while making my turn, there’s no way they could have avoided hitting me.
Ah, invincible youth.
I wasn’t at all into scareyoke, and after twenty minutes and one drink, I left.
On the way home, I stopped at the Food Lion near my house, where my credit card wouldn’t work in the cash register reader. The cashier walked around to my side, grabbed a plastic grocery bag, which she wrapped around my credit card, and tried to swipe my card in the reader through the bag.
Making the card thicker than the reader, the bag scrunched up as she jammed it through three times without it working before saying, “I don’t get it. That always works.”
As we waited for the manager to come over, I peeled the bag off my credit card which had stuck to it a little where there was still some goo on it from this very place that also thought it was a good idea to tape a Post-It note onto the magnetic strip area of my card while they held it in their Lost & Found. Bless their hearts in that place.
When the manager arrived, she took one look at the reader and said, “It’s not his card. The reader is frozen. It needs to be rebooted.”
While we waited for that to take place, I made some comment about the fact that I could use my debit card, but that I preferred to use my credit card, because I get points on it. The cashier then proceeded to tell me that I must read a CNBC article about how airlines are ripping off people with those points.
I left thinking, “Food Lion could work on cleaning up some of their own processes, before throwing stones at the glass ones of others.”