Today I slept in until 10, which is extremely late for me.
Because I had to be somewhere at noon, I didn’t bother going for a walk.
Where I went at noon was to HQ, where my bank, which actually has a branch inside of HQ, was holding a seminar on online banking.
I had opted to go to it not because I was especially interested in the subject, but because it gave Kathleen and I a chance to get together for lunch and not have to pay for it, as the seminar included a free lunch.
After it was over and I’d dropped Kathleen back off at her building (HQ is a pretty large campus with several buildings. In fact, there’s a shuttle bus that continually goes around from building to building.), I headed off to Best Buy to pick up a case for my PDA and the second season of “Dead Like Me.”
I picked up the latter – for even less than the already reasonable price ($36.99) that it was marked at – but not the former.
I was really only looking for two things in terms of a PDA case: a belt clip and a non-cheesy design.
The cases at Best Buy didn’t match my criteria in either regard.
From there I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and from there, Wal Mart.
As I was leaving Wal Mart, where I’d checked to see if they had any PDA cases, which they didn’t, I thought about something that had happened when I was in line at Best Buy.
The woman ahead of me had asked the girl working the register where the nearest Office Depot was. The girl didn’t know, but I did, and so shared my knowledge.
So it occurred to me that I should go to Office Depot myself to see what kind of cases they had.
I went there and found a case with a belt clip that was made specifically for my PDA by HP. It also was fairly non-cheesy, so I bought it.
There was a trade-off, though, in that it’s a flip open case rather than a booklet style, which is what I was kind of looking for, though the non-cheesiness and belt clip were more important.
Because I was in the vicinity, I decided that it would be wrong for me to not go into Circuit City, even though I didn’t intend to buy anything there.
Which is what I realized after wandering aimlessly for a couple of minutes and dodging employees before they could ask if they could help me.
So I started to make my way out, but decided to grab a Sprite for the drive home.
I did so, stopped at the register, gave the teenager with the acne and cracking voice my money, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Apparently the register had locked up.
He led me over to the customer service counter, where the register was also locked up.
It turns out that, just in time to inconvenience me, the entire register network in the Circuit City had gone down.
After waiting a bit, I took my money back, put the Sprite back in the cooler, and walked out to my car.
I considered going back into the Office Depot to buy a Sprite. After all, I’d nearly done so in the first place, before realizing that I didn’t want to bring it in to Circuit City with me, and leaving it in the car on a 90+ degree day while I wandered aimlessly and dodged employees before they could ask if they could help me would be a really bad idea.
However, I didn’t want to go back into Office Depot and look like a dork, so I opted to stop at a gas station on my way out of the little plaza.
As humid as it was (and has been), you’d think that if I was thirsty I could have just poured myself a tall glass of air, but somehow it doesn’t seem to work that way, so I stopped at what was apparently the world’s busiest gas station.
Eventually I made my way out of there, Sprite in hand, and headed home.
Once at home I didn’t do too much beyond make dinner (homemade Salisbury Steak with Smashed Potatoes), though I did watch an episode of “Dead Like Me” while I ate.
At first it made me happy, because it was a great episode, but then it made me angry because it was so good and I realized that there will never be any more because the people who run Showtime are a bunch of fucktards with their heads so far up their asses that you’d need to perform an Upper G.I. to see their faces and the American TV-viewing public would rather watch stupid-ass “reality” shows featuring some of the best arguments for mandatory contraception on the planet than watch some of the finest, most original, well-scripted and acted television ever broadcast.
(Takes a deep breath)
So that was pretty much my day.
After a while I did sit down and finally do some work on that picture for Scott’s D&D group. I finished one of the male characters and finally made it so that he doesn’t look like the gay International Male catalogue model that was used as the reference picture for him as he once did.
That leaves me with two characters to go, followed by some sort of background image for the final picture, and then the process of actually putting the whole thing together.
I don’t know how relevant the picture will be now, though, given that two members of the group just moved to a different state. Sorry it’s taking so long guys…
Along with summertime air that you can practically swim the breast stroke through and two-bedroom townhouses that cost as much as Bill Gates’ home, one feature of Northern Virginia that seems to be extremely common is the “vanity plate.”
I see them constantly on the various SUVs, luxury cars, luxury SUVs and other vehicles that clog the highways around here. Pretty much every other car I see has some kind of vanity plate.
Usually they’re just “cutesy” little things, like “K8TQT,” or, given the vast number of tech sector jobs out here, they’re nerdy, such as “IN2UNX” or “IMME” or “NOSPAM,” or totally nerdy, like “ONERING” (bolstered by a bunch of LOTR bumper stickers), but one thing I’ve noticed about them is that they often make no sense at all.
This can be because it’s some sort of “inside” thing, but most of the time they’re just totally inexplicable.
There are some that are so obscure that you can’t even be certain that they’re supposed to mean anything, though the letter-number combination just doesn’t quite look random.
Sometimes, when I’m stuck in traffic, it can help pass the time to try to decipher some of the more esoteric plates, but I frequently find myself just scratching my head in total bafflement at some of the sheer nonsense.
Like the other day I saw one that said “NXLIFE.”
Probably not random, but what the hell is it supposed to mean?
And today I saw one that said “TEA-PLEASE.”
WTF? Do you want people to think you’re gay?
My license plate spells absolutely nothing whatsoever, and that’s pretty much the way it’s going to stay. There’s pretty much nothing that I have to say that can be expressed in the form of a license plate.
I’m not really faulting people for having vanity plates (my dad has one, after all, as does my boss), but if you are going to bother having it say something, at least make it something reasonably sensible.
Or better yet, have it say something totally rude. Like “F3LCH3R,” or “DNKYPNCHR,” or “STEAMR,” though that last one would really only work in Cleveland…
In any case, that’s going to do it for today’s entry.
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