Double Flee A

As I begin this post, a helicopter flies directly overhead.

This morning I woke up at seven, had coffee, and went to Twin City Supply to buy a vernier caliper. I accidentally crumpled the corner of mine at school so I need a new one to measure the insides of slots. They didn't have a good one so they had to order one. Forty bucks, but what can you do?

Then I stopped by my friend's house and he was a crabby ******* about me coming over without calling. I might be able to understand this, but the first thing I said when I got there was "Hey, sorry to just drop in but I don't have a cell phone, wanted to see if you want to go get a burrito." After this, he acts like I'm ambushing him, making him get a burrito against his will or something, and then I offer to just leave so he can go back to watching TV. Which he doesn't want to do, but later I find out he doesn't want to shut the **** up about me just showing up at his **** house. Well, now the ****** isn't going to have to deal with me stopping by for a while, because I'm done getting yelled at for a while. What a *****. I mean, I'm making every effort to be polite and the guy's just a *******. We got tacos at chipotle, where I got the hot salsa. Which came back to haunt me later in a big way. Yow.

Across the street there was a black guy dresesd as a leprechaun holding a sign for seventy percent off sale at a jeweler who was going out of business. So we checked that out and the good stuff wasn't there for sale. Just the ugly, gawdy stuff.

On my way to home depot my whiny friend and I got in a little bit of a race on Lake street. This city is full of roads that you just want to haul ass on. They're asking for it, I swear. So we're doing about sixty in a thrity and I'm going to ease off and get behind my friend who's going to show me how to get to home depot, and I can't get behind him because h'es slowing down too fast. I'm thinking there must be a reason for this and I look up and sure enough, a cop sitting right in his car waiting for a couple of jackasses like us. So we slowed down (somehow) enough not to get ticketed, harassed, arrested, and sodomized, he showed me where to turn, and I waved goodbye to my whiny friend.

Then I went to home depot to see if they had a caliper that might save me some money and time. I wanted a digital one but the only digital ones anybody has have really shitty non-pointy inside measuring things, so I got out of there.

Across the parking lot is Costco, so I went there. I've always wondered what they have in there. The guy at the door stopped me from going in because I don't have a membership. He told me (in a loud, hateful voice) if I want in I have to go to the membership counter. I did not know this. So I passed the membership counter and walked in through the out-lane of cash register traffic. It's not that I'm trying to scheme some great bargains without paying, but it makes me mad when people treat me like a thief or something when I didn't do anything to deserve that. Maybe I have more class than they do, but I think you ought to let people walk around like the free people they are until they give you a reason to do otherwise. So I checked out costco. It was the most depressing experience I've had in the last month, easily. That place is floor to ceiling low prices, granted. They have a store brand, Kirkland, which is on paper towels, bath tissue, every disposable item you can think of, and most of the food. Which, I guess, in a way, is disposable, too. They sell kirkland chicken breasts for three something a pound, really cheap, but the breasts look kind of grey. And there's no doubt in my mind that these are the chickens that get shot into cages by the scary bionic chicken cannon. They had really big fillets of cheap salmon right next to that, and when you read the label it says "artificially colored". Which means the salmon was grey too, before they colored it. Great. Grey food, anyone? It was very quiet there and no one looked at each other in the eyes. Once I'd had enough of the low prices, I decided to go to a grocery store with un-grey food.

At hennepin and twenty-fourth right now there is an apartment on display. Somebody crashed their car into the corner of a storefront and the entire corner of the building came down. There was an apartment above that storefront, and now that the walls are gone, you can see it. Art still hangs on the wall, the bedroom door, marked "private", is open inward, and a beatles poster hangs in an adjacent room. The walls are a pink color, a closet door is open, clothes hanging in an orderly fashion inside. Some shoes were off to one side. It was easy to see everything in the room because even though the apartment was on the second floor, the floor curled downward. When it happened no one was hurt and the bed was lying outside on the sidewalk. What a mess. That lifted my spirits after the tragedy of costco.

After grocery shopping, I went to an oriental grocery store to get rice. Jasmine rice is dirt cheap there unlike american grocery stores where it's a novelty. I made dinner for JV and I and it turned out just OK. I didn't really have a plan. Flavor good, texture blah. Cabbage (not red, d'oh!), four chilis, hoisin sauce, jack daniel's (oh, yeah), sesame oil, steak, butter, ginger, garlic with rice.

I dipped strawberries (which are 2$ a pound in every grocery store in the city right now) in chocolate and also a couple of peeps, which I remember her liking from last easter. So dessert was definitely the strong point. Do I sound like a homemaker or what?

She brought me a present, a master lock to try the thing out on that was posted here a few days ago. I followed the instructions and it opened right up. Pretty cool stuff.

posted by dale @ 11:11 PM