What are we talking about today?

I'll get back to theme days once I find a groove of posting regularly. In the meantime, most of my posts are about some variation of books, bikes, buses, or Broadway. Plus bits about writing, nonprofits, and grief from time to time.

This blog is mostly lighthearted and pretty silly. It's not about the terrible things happening in the world, but please know that I'm not ignoring those things. I just generally don't write about them here.

16 July 2010

An Epic Trip to a Big Box

Yeah, that's how I feel about Wal-Mart right now. It's just a big box.

Normally, a trip to WM would not merit its own blog post, but I'm pretty well taking a break from"normally" for a while, until my life begins to feel normal again. Given the state of my brain, this may be a while.

Since we found our apartment online and only saw it after we arrived, we did not know in advance of our coming that our bedrooms have no ceiling lights. Or, indeed, any other lights. This made for an amusing couple of days as we tried to work in rooms with no light, but obviously we had to get some lamps.

Among our greatly-appreciated going-away gifts was a gift card to Wal-Mart. So, we decided to purchase a couple of floor lamps and some other odds and ends at WM. But first, we had to get there, and that was our adventure for our first Friday in Austin.

The Austin bus system has a fabulous trip planner, into which I put our address and where we want to go, and it gives us a few possible itineraries. Apparently, there are three WMs in Austin within easy reach of the public transport system, but none of them generated friendly itineraries; we finally chose the closest one, which still had us travelling for an hour with two transfers each direction. (BTW: This trip would be about 4 minutes if we were driving, Google Maps tells me.) But, we are relatively easygoing, and besides, it's not like we had much of an option. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to Wal-Mart we go.

We are still learning the bus system, so some of the transfers being really long was partly our own fault because they could have been shorter if we had been more aware of the bus operating schedule. The longest wait was the last one, as fate would have it; in the end, it may have been faster for us to just walk home instead of standing around for 40 minutes for a 10-minute bus ride.

All told, we left the house at 3 PM and returned at 8 PM. And that is why this day shall henceforth be called: The Epic Trip to A Big Box.

All was not wasted time, of course; we got to talk to some of the drivers, and met a neighbour who lives up the street and has two really cute kids. But I hope future shopping trips will be shorter.

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