Six Months and One Day

And the six months were pretty good, but the one day has caused us to rethink the whole thing.

We both got a terrible night's sleep last night, for far too many reasons.  We got up around 8:30 and packed and said goodbyes, and loaded the luggage cart.  But the big suitcase was too big to fit through the elevator doors, so we had to take everything off the cart and do it over.  The same was true again at the bottom, where the suitcase was too wide to fit on the cart through the door to the street.

But we got everything into the car, got the cart back into the lobby.  I went around the corner to Oren's for a coffee and a tea... closed.  So we drove over to Greenwich to RouRou, another nice little coffee shop.  The young proprietor was rolling out his awnings as we arrived, and he welcomed me in.  "Nothing like the smell of fresh croissants in the morning," he crowed.  I got an iced coffee for Nora...but he had no ice.  Oh, well, it had been refrigerated, so good enough.  I ordered an iced tea for me... but he doesn't do iced tea, so I had hot tea instead.

We got underway, not very much traffic.  The cats were whining.  We've discovered this stuff called Comfort Zone which is an attempt to replicate happy-cat pheromones–it really does seem to calm them down when you spray it around on the seats and floor.  But the can was back at home in my car.  So we stopped at a PetSmart, where I stayed in the car and Nora went in.  She returned many minutes later with Comfort Zone, a scratching post and a scratch board made with emery crystals so that it supposedly does a better job keeping their claws trimmed back.  But she realized that she hadn't gotten any paw-safe snowmelt, so she went back in while I sprayed a little happy mist around the car.  Two spritzes on Nora's seat, two on the center console, two on the floor of the back seat.  And then I wanted to shoot the little rug that's behind my seat, so I put the can into my left hand to reach around... and hosed myself directly in the right eye with a full stream of it.  90% ethanol right in the eyeball.

Ow.

Read the label.  "Eye Irritant," it says. Duh.

So my melted eyeball was dripping down the front of my jacket, but the stuff really does keep you pretty calm.  So I got out of the car and let the alcohol evaporate, and after about a minute, I could open my eye again, upon which I discovered that I still had vision and depth perception and really good tear-duct productivity.

Nora returned again, by which point I could pretty much see again.  So we drove off, bought gas, and proceeded on to the Woodbury Commons outlet center near Central Valley NY.  I need some new shirts for work, and Mom has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Philips Van Heusen, which gives her a card good for 40% of on any purchase of Van Heusen, Bass, Izod or other PVH brands from one of their stores.  We had that card today.

Can you even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th?  No.  Trust me, no, you cannot even begin to imagine how busy it is at one of America's largest outlet malls on December 26th.  We got there at about 11:45 am, and even the extended, overflow, distant, cowpasture parking lots were full.  (Honest, we saw one family who'd parked across the eight-lane access road at the nearby high school and walked across all that traffic rather than try to fight their way through Woodbury Commons parking.)  So we parked way out by the tour buses and snow plows, and walked into utter consumer hell.  There were rope-lines outside some of the stores, forty or fifty people waiting just to get IN to the Fendi store, for instance.  We found a map kiosk, located the Van Heusen store, and walked over.  Elbow to shoulder in there.  Long lines for the dressing rooms, lines for the registers.

I had an interesting conversation with the store manager while waiting to try on a shirt; he said that the rope lines we'd seen outdoors were more due to preventing shoplifting than managing crowds.  If the really high end stores let in only ten or fifteen people at a time, the staff can watch them all.

Nine shirts and a nice jacket later, we were done, and the price was admittedly crazy low, like about 80% lower than retail price. And the Comfort Zone left on my face probably kept me calmer than I otherwise would have been.

Walking back out at 1:30, the parking was even MORE full than it had been.  We walked past one little altercation, where one group of young people in a Scion and another group of young people in some anonymous ZipCar were both inserted at opposing angles about 30% of the way into a single parking space.  The two groups were standing around arguing about whose spot it was and who was wrong and all that, and the security guard on her Segway scooter said, "If there's an argument about a parking spot, neither car gets it.  That's the rule."  What a great sort of Dad-wisdom that is.  "If the twoaya's don't shut up, neither one'a ya's is gonna get any!" 

Nora hadn't had enough outlet therapy yet, so we went to another nearby shopping center and the Eileen Fisher Factory Store, where she got a nice mid-length coat.  And then we got back in the car and drove, and drove, and drove.  The cats were champs: eight hours, no food, no peeing, no puking, and after I melted my face off with the Comfort Zone, they were pretty placid about it all.

Finally, at 6:30, we were in the house.  Cats fed and watered, all luggage inside, and we were eating a mediocre takeout pizza that had the HUGE advantage of having required no time or labor to produce, so it tasted heavenly.  But we've used up just about all of our emotional reserves.  Fortunately, tomorrow, I'll be driving away for another two hours in each direction to go use my new pool cue for the very first time.  (If you want to see it, go to this link above, click on "cue collections," then "standard collection," then find the Grand Slam in natural finish.  Absolutely stunning, and the photos really reveal little about just how beautiful this thing is.)

I should probably shoot a little Comfort Zone around my car before I leave, just as a back-up...