$$: Coyote Sighting Edition

coy­ote

A coy­ote crossed the road in front of me this morn­ing as it trav­eled from one sec­tion of green­belt to another.  I can’t remem­ber ever being that close to a coy­ote before and see­ing it there, in the mid­dle of an upscale sub­ur­ban devel­op­ment, was a glo­ri­ous tes­ta­ment to the will and drive to sur­vive of God’s creatures.

Today started a lit­tle omi­nously.  As always, I woke up tired and feel­ing as if I hadn’t slept at all.  About halfway through my Tues­day morn­ing egging-on-of-The-Son-so-he-wouldn’t-be-late-for-class rou­tine, The Daugh­ter called from school.  I knew before I answered the phone that it wasn’t going to be good news.  It wasn’t.

She was feel­ing very sick to her stom­ach and could I come get her?  What was I going to say?  No?

A quick cal­cu­la­tion of time told me that if I left that very sec­ond, hit noth­ing but green lights, and didn’t come to a full stop in order to let her into the car, I could drive into town, pick her up, and make it back out to the house just in time to switch bod­ies in the pas­sen­ger seat and get The Son to his first class in time.

Of course, I could have called on The Hus­band — which I did, by the way, but only as back-up dri­ver just in case some­thing went wrong and I couldn’t make it out to our sec­tion of sub­ur­bia in time.  Really, it’s been a while since I had an oppor­tu­nity to don my super-mom cape and even longer since I had enough energy to even want to prove my worth as a wife and mother.  I saw this as a good oppor­tu­nity to earn a few mommy-brownie points.  After all, all I had to do was drive.

I’m happy to report the pick-up and round-trip drive went smoothly.  Not only did I arrive home in time to get The Son to school, I actu­ally man­aged to make a lunch for him too.

I left The Daugh­ter nap­ping on the couch and headed off to deliver The Son to school.  We arrived with exactly 0 sec­onds to spare before offi­cial class-start-time  — his fault he was late, not mine or The Daughter’s.  After the drop-off, I set off to run what turned out to be an entire day of errands.  I man­aged to spend a boat-load of money.

Here are the gory details:

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

Kwal Paint — ($6.24)
Remem­ber back in Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber when I spent  bazil­lion dol­lars on paint sam­ples for the exte­rior of our house?  And there was one time when the guy charged me $11.97 per quart for two quarts instead of the $9.00 I had oth­er­wise been pay­ing?  Well, it never seemed worth the gas or the time or the trou­ble to make the trip down there just for a $6.00 refund but today I hap­pened to be dri­ving right past the Kwal store and I hap­pened to have all of my old Kwal receipts in my wal­let just in case.  The guy was really nice; he had to run the refund by his man­ager (who hap­pened to be the guy who over­charged me) and then he issued the refund.

Tar­get — $31.52
A Vick’s humid­i­fier.  This time the fan isn’t mak­ing a very unhealthly grind­ing noise so we’ll con­sider it a keeper.  It is, at this moment, pump­ing des­per­ately needed humid­ity into the air in our liv­ing room.

Costco — $72.68
Yes­ter­day The Hus­band came home from his annual phys­i­cal and announced that his doc­tor had told him to get a blood pres­sure thingie from Costco.  Being given such orders, The Hus­band did what any man would do, he told me.  Well, okay, he asked me if I would pick one up the next time I was at Costco.  Being a good Sub­ur­ban Wife, I was happy to comply.

It’s an Omron HEM-775 Blood Pres­sure Mon­i­tor fea­tur­ing a Com­Fit™ Cuff.  Appar­ently this piece of high-tech equip­ment usu­ally costs $61.99 but the man­u­fac­turer is cur­rently offer­ing a $12.40 instant rebate so our price was $49.59.

The Hus­band decided I should wrap the box and stick it under the Christ­mas tree for him.  Merry Christ­mas, sweetie.  What a nut!

I also picked up a two-pack of 20-oz bot­tles Cetaphil lotion for The Son — $16.99.

Costco — $18.00
Nat­u­rally, while at Costco I stopped at the pumps and topped off The Tank’s tank.  I pumped 9.839 gal­lons at $1.829 per gal­lon.  The odome­ter read­ing was 134,938.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

My next move was dumb and I admit it.  No point in lash­ing me with a wet noo­dle, there’s no way you could inflict any more guilt than what I’m already self-inflicting.  The worst part is, I made the same mis­take twice today.  Two times.

I stopped by Dis­count Tires on the way home.  The Tank needed new tires.  Ear­lier this fall we’d toyed with the idea of replac­ing The Tank before the end of the year so we’d been hold­ing off on new tires fig­ur­ing we wouldn’t recover our expense and it would be bet­ter to sell it as-is and let the new owner take care of tires as they so desired.  But then the econ­omy tanked and we, like most of the rest of the coun­try, decided to tighten our belts and put all large-spending plans on hold.

I’ve been around the block enough times to know that you never go shop­ping for new tires when there’s snow on the ground.  Every­one and their uncle will also be at the tire store and you’ll wait in line for at least 36 hours.  So I waited until after our first snow­fall had become a dis­tant (3 day) mem­ory.  The weather was a gor­geous 70 today — per­fect weather for buy­ing tires.  And it was.  My wait time was 45 min­utes.  Prob­lem is, I overpaid.

And I’m really annoyed with myself.  I’ve been buy­ing tires from Dis­count Tires since I was 16.  Over the years I’ve shopped around but always ended up back to Dis­count because they con­sis­tently meet or beat oth­ers’ prices and their cus­tomer ser­vice has always been stel­lar.  So I walked in, chose a tire sim­i­lar to my old tires — which were excel­lent in both wear and ride — and handed over my credit card.

Dis­count Tire — $990.28
That bought me four LT265/75R-16/E1 123R Miche­lin LTX M/S tires, four replace­ment cer­tifi­cates (yes, I always buy them; yes, they’ve saved my butt), plus instal­la­tion and dis­posal of my old tires.

These tires are larger than the fac­tory spec tires.  It’s the size and type of tire that The Tank had on it when we bought it (used) and I’ve always just put the same type of tire back on it.  I like how it han­dles with the “light truck” tires.

Any­way, it appears that I would have paid less if I’d gone through Costco (though maybe their web­site price is for the smaller SUV tire and not the larger, “light truck” tire I bought.  I’ll have to do some more research.  I’d really like to dis­cover that I didn’t over-pay after all.  Over­pay­ing is the type of guilt I can carry around for decades.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

Any­way, after my first visit to Dis­count Tire, I made one more stop on my Tuesday-errand run.  Guess who I was shop­ping for:

Kroger — $8.13

• a 2-liter bot­tle of Canada Dry Gin­ger Ale — $1.25 (saved $0.24)
• a box of Kee­bler saltine crack­ers — $3.19
• 1/2 gal­lon of Hori­zon choco­late milk — $3.49 (saved $0.20)

Yup, that’s right.  I was shop­ping for The Daugh­ter.  I finally headed home, The Tank freshly shod and my mom-to-the-rescue reme­dies for sick tum­mies finally procured.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

I had a whole 1/2 an hour at home to dine and rest before hav­ing to head out again.  The Daugh­ter, feel­ing slightly bet­ter, announced that she had to acquire a copy of a new Jonas Broth­ers book [don’t ask] released today.  Appar­ently the book is a com­bined birth­day gift for a friend with whom The Daugh­ter et al will be lunch­ing tomor­row (pro­vided she’s healthy enough to go back to school).  We decided to stop at the book­store on the way to pick­ing up The Son from class.

Bor­ders — $23.11
The Daugh­ter, hav­ing a Bor­ders gift card, decided we should stop here first.  Upon mak­ing her pur­chase, how­ever, she dis­cov­ered that said card only had a $3.53 bal­ance.  Oops.  The remain­der, $19.58, was applied to her (my) credit card with (believed) promises that I’d be paid back this amount (since The Daugh­ter is respon­si­ble for pay­ing for all gifts using her allowance or Sun­day childcare/babysitting earnings).

Barnes & Noble — $0.00
The Daugh­ter also had B&N gift cards and, nat­u­rally, since she needed a copy of said Jonas Broth­ers book [don’t ask] for her­self, we drove down the street to pro­cure a copy.  Upon check­ing out at B&N, The Daugh­ter dis­cov­ered that the book was cheaper at B&N than what she’d just paid at Bor­ders.  After some mom/daughter dis­cus­sion, it was agreed that she should, hav­ing addi­tional B&N gift cards, pur­chase a sec­ond copy of the book and that after pick­ing up The Son, we’d return the Bor­ders copy.  I mean, come on, they really should get it together an not charge sev­eral $$ more than the store across the street.

Nat­u­rally, the pur­chase of the sec­ond book, which, by the way, had not yet been shelved at B&N so each time we wanted a copy we had to first find an employee and then wait for said employee to travel to the back of the store and bring one copy up the front of the store where we were stand­ing in an impos­si­bly long mid-day line wait­ing for the lone clerk to check out all of the mid-day book-buyers — nat­u­rally, that pur­chase made us late pick­ing up The Son.

Mir­a­cle of mir­a­cles, he actu­ally was not in a bad mood at hav­ing to wait out­side for 5 min­utes.  Did I men­tion it was a gor­geous 70 degrees today?

So we picked up The Son and instead of being able to take the short, quick, direct high­way route home we had to take the longer city route because we had to go home via Bor­ders.  Except not quite.

The Daugh­ter, never too happy to be forced to social­ize with fam­ily, was hap­pily perus­ing her new Jonas Broth­ers book [don’t ask] when to her (forcibly voiced) hor­ror, she dis­cov­ered a page with a print­ing issue in the form of a large pur­ple streak down the mid­dle of a full-page glossy photo [don’t ask].  So we first stopped by B&N where I left the kids in the car and went in to make the exchange.  Again, I had to find a store employee who had to trek to the back of the store who then made her way back to the front of the store with a replace­ment book.  Such efficiency.

I returned to the car where I found The Son wait­ing out­side of the car because appar­ently The Daugh­ter had felt it her respon­si­bil­ity to edu­cate her younger sib­ling on the finer details of each Jonas brother [don’t ask].  Amaz­ingly, he was quite too-natured about said torture.

Bor­ders — ($23.11)
After pil­ing back in the car we drove down the street where, again, I left the apples of my eye in the car while I went into the store.  This time I did a return.  The clerk put the entire pur­chase amount back on the credit card mak­ing our math for today’s book pur­chases all that more com­pli­cated.  This time The Son had stayed in the car and the chil­dren were engaged in a lively and amus­ing debate over the issue of whether or not het­ero­sex­ual males eval­u­ate the looks of other men in the same way that het­ero­sex­ual females eval­u­ate other females.  Ah, the joys of moth­er­ing teens.

Finally, we went home.  But I was not done spend­ing for the day.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

I was home a whole 10 min­utes before The Hus­band arrived home ready for his after­noon nap.  Since The Daugh­ter was still feel­ing too queasy to go swim a cou­ple of miles, I took the rare oppor­tu­nity of hav­ing access to the Impreza dur­ing busi­ness hours and took it, too, over to Dis­count tires.  The Hus­band had recently men­tioned that he’d noticed the Impreza’s tires were look­ing a bit, well, tired.  They were actu­ally more than that.  The two front tires were prac­ti­cally bald.

Dis­count Tire (take II) — $640.57
This out­ra­geous sum bought me four P205/55R-16 Goodyear Assur­ance Triple­tred tires plus the replace­ment cer­tifi­cates, etc.

These things have a killer thread pat­tern.  Very nice.  And a nice ride with excel­lent han­dling if the short trip home is any indi­ca­tion.  This time the wait time was about 1–1/2 hours.

I can’t tell if I over­paid for these too.  Costco doesn’t offer this par­tic­u­lar tire, at least not in my area, and I couldn’t find any reli­able com­pa­ra­ble prices online.

If it’s any con­so­la­tion, and it is for me, Dis­count Tire is much closer to our house and I’m always quite good about tak­ing in the cars for reg­u­lar free tire rota­tions and air-pressure checks.  I know myself well enough to know that I’d be much less likely to stick to a tire-rotation pro­gram at Costco, if indeed Costco offers free rota­tions.  It’s just too far from the house.

Live and learn, I guess.  Any­way, it was a good day.  I got to see a coy­ote.  And I got to spend a lively after­noon with two of my most favorite peo­ple in the world even if, or maybe because, they were dis­cussing some­thing as ridicu­lous as the Jonas Broth­ers [don’t ask].

edit:

Oops.  For­got to men­tion that my sched­uled Share­builder buy went through.  I ended up buy­ing 12.2439 shares of GE for $196 (plus the $4.00 trans­ac­tion fee).  I don’t have a total in front of me right now so I’ll have to report in some other time as to how many total shares of GE I now own.
photo credit: pro­ral­lypix

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