leaving for family reunion
written at 8:33 p.m. on 06.19.03
Well, under ten clicks to get to Operation Diary. I'm sorry to say that I'll be leaving you all in suspense for a whole week almost. Saturday morning, I'm leaving to go to Tennessee (and maybe Virginia, if I can sucker my parents into it) for six days for a family reunion. Somebody had the dumb idea to have one every other year, a tradition which only started two years ago. The only nice part about this year is that since my dad is coming, we have enough people to make it worth renting one of the lakeside cabins at my grandma's nearby park. Let me back up. Two years ago, my mom, bro, and I had to sleep in my grandma's camper, b/c it wasn't worth renting a cabin for just three people. Furthermore, living in my grandma's camper meant always being at the center of action, because everybody always met at her house for dinner and Scrabble and stuff.Who the heck is Chris Wirsing? That name has shown up on the caller ID about twice a day for the past three months, nobody knows who it is, so nobody picks it up. Nobody is home to pick up any phone calls anyway, so I don't know why we even invest in phones. I use my cell phone for most everything now anyway, cuz I'm always frickin gone. Ok, back to the reunion thing. So, since my family and I will be staying in a cabin, we can spend most of the time there, by ourselves. The cabins are super nice, with a TV, kitchen, two bedrooms, a bath,... They're like mini-houses... shrunk down a lot. Anywho, the only catch is that a couple other families will be staying in cabins too, so that might mean having to interact with them almost as much as when we were in the camper. Not that I dislike the relatives on my mom's side of the family, but as Allison can testify to, these people are a little weird sometimes. Take my cousin Jenna for instance. She's going into kindergarten or first grade or something. She will literally walk up to people and ask, "Why are your teeth yellow?" Yeah, she is honest to a fault. Way too blunt. It's embarassing. She would probably ask a homeless person why he or she had smelly clothes on. Speaking of clothes, I went shopping today and bought some. But that's not where I wanted to go with that transition. I really wanted to talk about this poor old lady that I saw at Sam's Club today. I almost cried while I watched this woman and her son (who had a very bad haircut, which is what attracted my attention to them in the first case.) Anyway, this old, old lady and her late-30-ish-year-old son were waltzing around looking for men's shorts, which my mom and I were doing for my dad. So, I noticed that the woman had on hot pink sweatpants and a white sweater with a hole on the shoulder. (Why does that word look weird all of a sudden? Sholder, shoulder, ... I give up.) Anyway, what made tears well up in my eyes was when I looked down at her feet. She was wearing what looked like 20-year-old plaid men's slippers, and they were so big on her that she had rubber banded them about fifteen times around the middle of her foot to keep them on!! It was the saddest thing that I have seen in a long time. I wanted to take her shoe shopping and clothes shopping and to take her out to lunch... but something about not wanting to offend her or her son stopped me. I kinda wished that I would've done all that, but they probably would've turned down my offer anyway. :( It was just so sad. Well, nobody truly interesting came in to the bookstore today. One lady came in with her receipt from a couple of days ago and said, "I found my fifteen dollar coupon, and the guy said I could just bring back my receipt and get the money taken off my credit card." Now, first off all, the coupon, which is one of the ones you get if you are on the mailing list and if you spend 200 dollars you get fifteen bucks on your next purchase, and this needs to be presented AT the TIME OF PURCHASE. Yeah, it's always good to read the bold print on the coupon. Anywho, I went and got Frank to ask him what to do, and he went and got the assistant manager, and she said to just use the coupon on the next purchase. The lady spent five minutes questioning this dumb policy and saying "but the guy said..." until she finally walked out and muttered, "I shop here all the time!..." to her mother who was with her. Anywho, the point is that people are illogical and highly irrational when they think that they have been wronged. If she really came all the time, which she obviously did if she'd spent the two hundred bucks to get the coupon, then why not take fifteen dollars off of the next purchase? If she shopped as often as she claimed then the next purchase wouldn't be far off. Besides, that fifteen dollars is the same fifteen dollars no matter what purchase. It won't make a difference on your credit card bill. Oh man, I did something I'm not sure I'm proud of today. I finally relented and bought a GameBoy Advance. I almost got the SP, but it was $20 dollars more. See, I was behind the times getting GameBoy Color, which I got from the kid across the street, who used to hang out with my bro a lot, for like twenty bucks or so. I was proud of the good deal that I'd gotten. Except, the only reason I got a good deal was that GameBoy Advance had just come out and the kid across the street was planning to upgrade. SO, to make a long story short, I've tried to be happy with my super-steal-of-a-deal GBC, but it came to a halt today. I couldn't deal with the fact that the only cames for GBC that were left on the planet were Mary Kate and Ashley games and Barbie Detective. Oh, and some Dragonball Z stuff. Yeah. So, in a desperate attempt to catch up with the newness of technology, I spent seventy bucks on a GameBoy Advance. My brother was pissed, first of all that I got a GameBoy Advance and would be borrowing his games for a while, and second of all that I hadn't bought SP. I personally don't see the purpose in spending twenty more bucks that I don't have on a foldable, back-lit version of Advance. I don't need it to fold and I'm perfectly content with getting a booklight for when I play in the dark... for when I play GameBoy in the dark, haha, that's just not sounding right. Yeah, I should've spent the seventy bucks on a Gold Membership and the LOTR special edition or the Ring itself or Arwen's necklace, but... those things won't get me through a thirteen hour car ride. Well, the necklace or ring might, and if I had a portable DVD player, then the movie would of course by awesome, but.. it's too late, I've already opened the package and I'm not gonna care. Actually, I bet I could get my dad to bring his laptop, which plays DVDs, and I could watch LOTR the whole way there... over and over and over. AND, I might even be able to get an internet connection. Sweet diggety. I'll see what I can do about getting an update from either the cabin or from my grandpa's computer. Hmm... The ideas are just flying through my head. This is when the little people in my head whip out their handy-dandy butterfly nets in attempt to catch some ideas, but, oh no! the moths have eaten holes in the nets, and the ideas are gone, POOF, just like that. Well, I'd better be off to see that wizard friend of mine, before I get sucked into the evilness of the Iliad and the wonderfulness of The Hours. SO, unless I keep a diary on paper in TN, or unless I get internet access, or unless I update tomorrow... BAH, enough unlesses. I'll hopefully see you sometime in the near or far future. Bwa ha ha. Or, in other versions... Mua ha ha. I like Bwa ha ha better, personally. THE END!!! EAT THE BOGUSNESS!!
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