Saturday:
-Made coffee, tried to get kids to eat breakfast (always a battle)
-Wife took son to pediatrician appointment while I took daughter and cat to veterinarian appointment (app't for cat, not daughter).
-Took cat home, $180 poorer. Should have left the cat there and taken home my money instead.
-Drove to auto parts store and installed car battery that Manny, Moe, and Jack said they were too busy to do for her - WTF?! Since when does a battery purchase not come with free installation?
-All of us drove in two cars to nearby shopping center with notoriously tight and crowded parking lot for lunch, and ended up going to two different restaurants (daugher and I to one, son & Mom to other - kinda fun and unexpected)
-Long afterwards, delighted in hearing about how son and wife watched daughter and me walk across the street to my car parked in the huge and far less crowded parking lot there and quickly escape from the Saturday retail hell zone as they waited for four cars to fight over two parking spots so they could back out of their parking space when we were all leaving restaurant row
-Went to Home Depot for a wall-mounted dimmer switch and Bad, Barf, & Bellyache (Bed, Bath, & Beyond
) for a shower squeegee (yeah, I'm really livin' the life here)
-Visited library for audio books for me, bedtime story books for kids, a couple audio CDs, and a DVD for Saturday night family movie night (Toy Story 3 - wonderfully delightful when you haven't seen it in a few years), paid late fees and an additional $20 fine for "lost" DVD that I thought we had returned. "If you find it, bring it back, and we'll
give you your money back", said the cute young librarian. The italicized part is important later.
-Came home, dropped off daughter, since wife and son had finally escaped the world's worst parking lot, loaded snow tires in trunk, grabbed unwatched DVD (Ant-Man) that I had just paid for as being lost from on top of DVD player, where it sat since I brought it home weeks ago.
-Went to library and triumphantly presented "lost" DVD to cute young librarian and happily extended palm to receive $20 bill in return.
-Watch disappointedly as she went to find her supervisor, and then another, and then another, who all came over to inform me that library policy says they will mail me a check for $20 in two weeks.
-After some very polite and smile-filled negotiations, which included frequent pointing to the cash drawer where my $20 had been deposited less than an hour before and still resided, and much waving of the receipt proving same, departed with my $20 bill and four librarians giving each other the "well, I never!" routine
-Drove across the street to my local Shady Tire emporium, land of the quick & cheap snow tire swap, congratulating myself on finally going on a weekend with another week of warm and sunny weather forecast, rather than going just before the first snow of the season is called for. Surely I'd be in and out in a flash.
-Didn't even get out of the car after seeing cars packed into the Shady Tire parking lot as densely as they had been in LunchLand a couple hours previously. Crap. Well, there's always next weekend.
-Drove to Performance Bike to get ball bearings, cone wrench, long stick magnet thing as seen in how-to-videos to suck old bearings out of funky old grease, cassette wraparound chain thing, and that big socket to get the freewheel/freehub (still not sure which is which) off. Oh, and some 700x28 tires for the Allez, which I was going to buy at Veloswap, but couldn't find except at $45 each - no thanks, that's car tire prices!
-Of all that, found only the cassette wraparound chain thing. They had none of the other stuff, including the tires. Hmm. I thought 28s would be a popular size. Maybe it's TOO popular?
-Visited old-school hardware store on way home and got long stick magnet thing (which I've wanted for a long time anyway and am glad to finally have a good reason to buy), decided against going to another LBS since I was tired off all this driving around
-Drove by Shady Tire again, just before they closed, and found them as full o' customers as ever. Dang.
All that was between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM.
Today was similarly busy, but I chose to spend the time I could have been riding at a movie theatre, where I saw the first movie that wasn't a Star Trek movie in a theatre since I can't remember when. Might have squeezed in a ride later on, but dang ol' Standard Time is back in most of the USA, so it was dark way too early this afternoon.
And that's why I didn't ride this weekend, with a bunch o' stuff from today omitted because this is absurdly long as it is.