winterbadger | enough micro posts....

I finally bit the bullet yesterday and ordered a new mattress. Even if I'm only here for another six or seven months, I'm tired of being almost as tired and achy when I get up in the morning as when I went to bed.

Yesterday was an odd day. The cats woke me up at 4, which is their new thing, which I could do without. I went back to sleep and woke up around 7 or 8. I was full of all the tasks I was going to do, but somehow I got bogged down in one from the day before. I really wanted a good breakfast out, but I thought "Well, I'll just do this one thing" (inventorying some figures someone had asked to buy). But suddenly it was ten o'clock, and my chances of getting breakfast out were vanishing. But I had only one more bit to do... showered...and it was somehow one o'clock. There was no way I was going to get all three sets of outside chores (1: take package of figures to post office to get price for postage, pick up newly framed print, deposit rolled coins at bank and get more rolls; 2: get groceries and dry cleaning; 3: buy a new backup phone and a new mattress) done before meeting a date at 3.45 in Bethesda for an afternoon movie.

Well, the bank was already closed, so forget the tasks I was planning to do in aged-hippie town. I got down to the car and realised I had forgotten the other, crucial task: put air in the tyres, because the flat tire warning light was on.

Now, it's lovely living on the border between aged-hippy town and undocumented-immigrant town, but one thing we lack are gas stations with amenities. In aged-hippy town, there are a couple of service stations, but they would want to check all my tires for me (for a fee), and they would all be jammed (because only one of them is open on weekends--god forbid people offer services when people can use them, or the city allow more merchants to open businesses--that would only cause people to want to come to town and that would cause TRAFFIC and PARKING problems, two things aged hippies prefer that other towns have [you know, the ones that they drive to and park in to do all their shopping]). And in undocumented-immigrant town, not to put too fine a point on it, but the tragedy of the commons reigns. Anything that isn't protected is broken, busted, or stolen. So none of the gas stations have any "conveniences"; hell, one of the gas stations doesn't even sell gar, since the chain that owned it abandoned it and an enterprising entrepreneur moved in and opened its garage. He does perfectly good work (he made several repairs to my Geo Prizm before it got too expensive to keep fixing it), but he doesn't sell gas, and he certainly doesn't have a public air pump.

So I figured I'd go to the Crossroads, where there are several service stations. And where my dry cleaning needed to be picked up. And where I get the groceries when I'm smart enough not to go to the We Sell Only Really Socially Conscious Food, But By God You Had Better Be Prepared To Leave Your Whole Paycheck Here store (often known for short as Whole Foods).

I got the dry cleaning, but the first station I tried had no air pump. I stopped to get the groceries (figuring that, as it was starting to snow, it would be OK if they then sat in the car while I dealt with the tyres.) The car park was jammed (as it often is, because, like aged-hippy town, the Crossroads likes to pretend its a walkable community, so car parks are tiny; no one ever walks, and there's nothing like a decent public transport system, but I'm sure that the LOOK of the thing makes it all worthwhile). I stopped and ate some lunch (since it was now closing in on 2 and I'd never had any breakfast) at California Tortilla (I'd think of a nickname for them, but, really, that's about as evocative as you can get). Then I collected my reusable bags, collared a shopping cart that someone had just left in the middle of the sidewalk a block away from the grocery store (because why inconvenience themselves by taking it back? they were done with it) and proceeded to the grocery.

Only to be reminded that there was (a) a mattress store and (b) a store for my phone company right here in this shopping park. If only I had been here earlier! The phone store was jammed, and doing *anything* involving phones takes forever, let alone already complex things like "I want to buy a crap phone and shift the number from my cable account to it so I can (a) keep that number when I cancel my cable service and (b) finally have another phone on my "family" plan so I can cancel the package for my ex GF that I've had on there for a year and a half now."

So returned the shopping cart and nipped into the mattress store and invested a precious half hour of my dwindling time checking out half a dozen different mattresses and eventually buying one that, with the box spring, was still well within the price range I had already decided on (yes, I could have gone to several places and comparison shopped, tried to wring more price concessions out of the legion of Nigerian salesmen running all of them, but would it really be worth my time? I figure my free tome is worth at least as much to me as what I make, let alone what I'm nominally paid [150% of my takehome] or what the government gets charged for my services [roughly 300% of my takehome], and at 4-5 more hours to actually go around to 3-4 more stores and get other prices, plus beat down some experienced salesman [who doubtless has Haggle-5 and Barter-6, let alone Deal With Customer Who Thinks He Knows the Score-3 or -4], well, it would not be worth my time. I did resist buying the expensive extra pillows he wanted to sell me, since I knew I could get roughly the same pillow at Ikea for less than half the price.

Then I got the groceries, filled up the tyres, and drove home. Would I still have enough time to make it to my date? That's in the next installment! But for now I need to go shower and put clothes on, so that I'm not still wearing nothing but a t-shirt when