Friday: You call that 7300 days?

Well, despite being stressed out to the max, Omaha and I managed to get away for the evening (thank you so much, Lisakit, for coming over even with your messed-up ankle). We went to the Saffron grill where the couple behind us talked Star Trek all dinner long, but that was okay; I vaguely recognized them from a long-past Merchants of Diva party. Omaha and I commiserated about how stressed out we were and how well we were doing otherwise, and talked about the opportunities that might be coming up in the near future.

After dinner, we went shopping. I know, that doesn't sound like a sexy thing to do on your 20th anniversary, but Omaha won't shop for herself unless I make her, and so I took her to the mall and told her to buy herself a few decent bras, as the ones she owns are falling apart.

After that, we drove down to Elliot Bay Hot Tubs and spent an hour relaxing. And believe me, that's the most relaxed I've felt in days. We just relaxed in that very warm room for an hour, listening to music on the in-house "Tranquility" channel, and decided that was that. We were still too stressed out for more.

We went home and went to bed. Whee. Exciting.

JC Penny still pushing the ANA line...

I'm sorry, but this poster is just too damned obvious. I don't care what JC Penny thinks it's doing, this is way too obviously a reference to anorexia by now to be anything but a pitch to girls who want to look way thinner.

What we did Saturday...

Saturday, I woke up early to help a friend of a friend's move out of her apartment, which was scheduled to be torn down. While I don't regret the time invested or the social capital developed, I have to say that there are days where I'm exceptionally grateful that Omaha civilized me. Retreating from the squalor of life by spending every spare moment in a City of Heroes is no way to go through life.

After moving out the couches and bookshelves and most of the boxes, I headed back home for a quick shower before taking Kouryou-chan to dance class. On returning, I started making bread, starting with about a kilogram of hard winter wheat flour. I went with Bittman's recipe rather than Manville's because the latter takes much longer (but does taste so much better). Those were for the Oloteas potluck.

As it turned out, Kouryou-chan's dance rehearsal was cut short by a lack of other students. She's the only one who's consistently shown up for every class, knows her part and her marks, and is ready for the show. The rest, not so much.

After the bread was beautifully baked, we headed out. Traffic was awful; one lane was closed on I-405 and getting north was a bear.

Oloteas was as lovely as ever. We hung out with friends, we swam in the pool, I flirted outrageously, and ultimately everything got hung up when Kouryou-chan suddenly showed a terrible cough and exhaustion. After the potluck, we ended up going home.

Everyone else went to bed on time. Me, I got trapped in Plants Vs. Zombies and ended up playing until after 1am.

And Sunday...

I seem to have caught a mild flavor of Kouryou-chan's cold. It's an annoying summer headcold, the kind where all you get is constant sniffling and sneezing, and a bit of sore throat, and maybe a sinus headache, and that's about it.

Despite that, I spent most of the day running around like a madman. Starting this morning, Omaha and I made a run over to Costco for our monthly run. This was especially important as the house had run out of tissue paper and with two colds and an allergy in the house, having that is critical. We shopped quickly, then ran over to the mall nearby to drop off Yamaraashi-chan, who was going to spend the afternoon with a friend, going to a movie and then shopping afterward.

After that, we got home and Omaha immediately fell asleep, apparently not having slept well the night before because of her allergies. I ended up putting away the entirety of the Costco run, including slicing the meats into family-sized portions and putting them into the freezer.

Fans line up for Michael Jackson

After that, I ran Omaha up into Seattle for a meeting she was having with her coven. We stopped at an Arby's on the way up and that was a comedy of errors: she dropped a potato cake down into the seatwell where it fell apart (gross) and I dropped an open tube of mayonnaise into the opposite seatwell, where I managed to get it out without squirting the stuff everywhere.

After dropping her off, on the way back I passed by a "Michael Jackson tribute event," where a local radio station was lining up 1000 fans to moonwalk all at once. It was supposed to be a world record, but you had to be able to moonwalk, and apparently they couldn't find enough people to fill Michael Jackson's marvelous shoes.

I stopped by the grocery store on the way home for peanut butter, milk and eggs, three more things we were out. Back at the house, I made Kouryou-chan some lunch of PB&J, and then it was back out onto the road to pick up Yamaraashi-chan from the mall. I went early to stop at Cash & Carry, where I got more club soda, 20 pounds of pasta, 10 pounds of aborio rice, and 10 pounds of cous-cous, all for less than $40. Not too shabby at all.

I picked up the kid and went home. By now, it was four o'clock, and I still had chores to do. I set the kids to doing theirs: cleaning the kid's bathroom sink, and changing bedsheets. Mine was to mop the dining room and living room floors, taking out the trash and recycling in the process. That was a ton of work.

Around seven it was time for Yamaraashi-chan to go over to her mother's for the first two-week block of summer, and the rest of us settled down to a slow dinner of leftovers. Since I had a few minutes, I finished processing the now-chilled chicken stock, which tastes wonderful, into plastic bags, and then settled those into a tall pot back in the 'fridge to settle, and I can de-fat them tomorrow.

My last chore was putting two weeks of receipts into Quicken. Goddess, I'm supposed to have a cold, and taking it easy, and life just doesn't let me.

Probably not the recession at work this time

Another store closes

While this one could be attributed to the recession, I have long believed that Franklin Covey was on its downslope. With the ubiquity of handheld organizational programs in Palms, iPhones, and other smart devices, and the equal emphasis on DIY GTD solutions that get away from the formulae of the gurus and instead consider what works for you, the Franklin Covey program was more or less doomed to eventual dissolution. (By the way, that link is just phenomenal at covering the basics of GTD, thanks to the everywhere-at-once Gina Trapini.)

Still, I loved this store once upon a time and gave them an awful lot of my money before figuring out what I really needed and could put into a Moleskin with my own weekly program.