Anyway. Let us continue. I might be able to wrap up everything in this post (but I doubt it).
The morning of the 26th was chilly, but the day itself got incredibly unseasonably warm -- by the afternoon it had to reach 65 or so, to the point where I didn't even need to wear my coat when Daisy and I were outside and while we were tossing the football around with the family. Because of this, she and I wore our new, Mama-crafted matching fleece sweaters, and we got up to make our trip out into the post-Christmas wasteland.
"Where did you want to go?" she asked.
"Gordman's, really, but that's about it unless you had anywhere else to go."
I wanted to hit up Gordman's because A.) there's not one of them around here, and B.) their after-holiday sales are generally really good; last year, around New Year's, I got bags upon bags of holiday-themed coffee that lasted me several months, well into the spring, for about $2 a bag. You can't beat that pricing. You just can't. I also was able to get a lot of nice teaching clothing at Gordman's, incredibly cheaply, over the summer when I was up there, and wanted to see if I could find anything else that would work for that. Again, I had my gift cards, so it wasn't like I would be spending my own money -- or so I thought, anyway.
As I mentioned before, my Discover card (which I'd had for about a year, but hadn't used before last month) has a massive limit on it. Like, I could buy a decent used car with it if I wanted to. Over the course of January, I'll more than likely have to put a few hundred dollars' worth of charges on it in order to go grocery shopping a few times since I won't be getting paid until the end of the month, and I can do that because of its large limit. If you'll recall, I also paid it off this month so that it would be balance-free before my trip, in the strange case that I had to use it a lot. I used it once on the way up there to get some stuff at the York Walmart, but again, I planned to use the gift cards for whatever I needed/found/wanted/etc. while shopping on the day after Christmas.
This. Did not happen.
We went to Gordman's, and I began stocking up on their discounted coffee. They had a lot of it, all of which I was getting at 50% off, so the final cost to me was $2.50-3.00 per bag. I don't know how much of it I got, but it was at least 8 or 9 bags. I got a bag of it for Daisy, too, as she wanted one that was maple-flavored. I didn't care; I can't get coffee that cheaply anywhere else, and it will last me months. Gourmet coffee. Good flavors, too: caramel, vanilla, chocolate raspberry, etc. Each bag gives me about 6-8 pots of coffee, roughly -- more if I cut it with the cheaper stuff I get at Walmart. This sets me up for coffee for about three months or so, on average. Something like that, anyway. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if I still have some of it after Daisy and I are married. My mother put some single-pot bags of coffee in with my box of stuff, too, and I haven't even used any of that yet. I still have probably two pots left of the Tim Horton's coffee Daisy got me for my birthday.
Daisy had also mentioned to me the week before that Gordman's had luggage on sale when she was doing shopping there previously, and that some of it was really, really cheap. I've needed a new suitcase for years. Well, I've needed a suitcase, period for years. I've never owned a suitcase. All of the traveling I've done over the years I've done with my backpack and/or a second bag for my laptop, but that's it -- and because of that, I've learned to travel light. I dress in layers so that I don't have to pack that stuff in my bags, I take only what I need to survive regardless of where I'm going, and generally speaking I get along just fine. However, that isn't exactly practical for long stretches of time (not that I can travel that long with the cats) or for faraway trips (like visiting my parents back in WV). In the summer, I wear less clothing, yes, but I can't dress in layers, which makes it even harder if I travel then. So, yes, I needed a suitcase and have needed one for a while.
Daisy took me down the luggage aisle, where everything was marked 33% off. Within 30 seconds, I found one I liked, it was $25 before the discount (marked down originally from $70), and I said "Okay, I'll get this one. I like it."
"Don't you want to look at the others?" she asked me.
"Nope, this one's good," I said, and stuck it in the cart.
That's how I buy things I need -- I don't spend minutes or even hours hemming and hawing over choices and styles. I look, I grab one in my price range, and I move on. Why waste the time, you know?
The one I picked was a roller bag that is 24" -- the maximum size for carry-on, so I won't have to check it if I fly with it -- and it's sturdy and light when empty. Semi-hardshell case. Upholstered and padded-lined. That's all I wanted. It'll hold about 3x-4x as much as my backpack will. And that's all I needed.
I really didn't find much else in Gordman's; I picked up a Firebird t-shirt (because, if you know me, you know I've always wanted a Trans Am) for $8, and I found a Punisher coffee mug for $4 to add to my nerdy mug collection -- I already have Transformers, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, and Batman mugs -- and we checked out. The total came to $63.
The Visa gift cards were only $50 each. I didn't want to use an entire one and then piggyback $13 over onto the next one, so I just used the Discover card again -- which is why I mentioned that earlier. It's not a big deal; I'll pay it all off slowly until I can get it completely paid off, and I know I'll be using it for groceries next month, as I said above. By mid-semester (spring-break-ish), all of my credit cards should be mostly, if not completely, paid off again. So, yeah, I'm not incredibly concerned with all of it. I saved the Visa gift cards and didn't end up using either of them on my trip to Omaha -- I'll probably use them for some of the aforementioned groceries or ordering some stuff online that I can't get otherwise.
Upon taking the stuff out to the car, Daisy and I had our one and only argument of the entire trip, and the only argument we've had in probably close to...oh, three months? Four? Something like that.
Why? Because of ten dollars. Or something close to that, anyway.
Looking back on it now, it was sort of ridiculous. Okay, it was really ridiculous. At least to me, anyway.
Daisy asked me to check the receipt to make sure that I got the suitcase for the 33% discounted price. I checked it. I didn't; it rang up the full $25 amount.
"Take it back in and tell them it didn't ring up correctly. Or I'll do it and get the money back."
"Eh," I said, "I don't care."
"What?"
"I don't care. It doesn't bother me in the least. It was marked down from $70. I got it for $25. I paid for it with the credit card. I don't care."
And that's how the argument started. I won't bore you with the details, most of which are irrelevant anyhow. I honestly didn't and don't care one way or the other. I saved a ton of money on it anyway, I needed it, and I saved a lot more money on all of the coffee that I'd purchased at deeply-discounted prices to make up for it. It didn't bother me if I didn't save a whopping $8.25 (33% on the suitcase, before tax) because it didn't ring up correctly. I didn't want to go through the hassle of trying to put $8.25 back on my card, and trying to prove to them that yes, it was on sale -- who knows if it actually was? Maybe not all of the suitcases/luggage was on sale, and I'd picked one of the ones which wasn't 33% off. Why lug everything back in there and bicker with the salespeople about it when the store was busy and I didn't care? It didn't matter to me in the slightest. Pick your battles, folks. This wasn't an important one to me.
Of course, my attitude on the subject strongly irritated Daisy, which is why we were fighting about it in the first place, and she kept bringing it up and pushing me on the issue -- which I found pointless, and it made me angry. I don't get angry with Daisy; I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually been angry with her or angered by her over the course of our entire relationship. We don't generally fight about anything; we talk it through and use our communication skills, because that's what mature, intelligent adults do. But, on the other hand, I'm also the sort of person who, when I say to drop a subject and let it go, I mean it. Daisy is not that type of person -- she wants logic and reason and why, why, why in everything, and I'm not like that. I don't have to have logical reasons for why I don't care about $8.25 of a luggage refund -- it doesn't matter to me and I just don't care. $8.25 on a credit card purchase isn't going to make or break me, and it's not like I can devote complex reasoning to why I don't care about something. And, most of all, it didn't affect Daisy herself -- it wasn't eight bucks of her own money, or anything like that, which if it were, I could understand. I just didn't get why she cared so much about something so obviously trivial.
Our fight lasted about an hour before we discussed everything calmly and made up. Her parents, of course, took her side when we told them about the luggage experience. I still didn't care, and we didn't go back to Gordman's to dispute or haggle with them. To me, it wasn't worth my time, and we had a lot more to do while we were there. The luggage issue was quickly forgotten.
As I mentioned previously here in the blog, the 26th was the day all of us had planned to celebrate my birthday. I'd been asked what I wanted for dinner that night, as it was my choice apparently, and I half-jokingly, half-seriously had answered with "poutine." A day or two before, I told Dad about that, and he had told me in all seriousness that it had already been planned, that they were already working on it -- which surprised me, since I hadn't been completely serious about it. True to form, they'd picked up a ton of fries and cheese, and had made extra gravy. The poutine was happening. Daisy even had vegan cheese and vegan gravy for her own poutine concoction. With it, we had hot turkey-and-gravy sandwiches, with leftover stuff from the dinner the day before (it was a good way to get rid of a lot of leftovers, apparently, which was good). I had two large servings of poutine and was full. It was a very nice, thoughtful dinner made for me, and I loved it.
That wasn't all, however -- at the end of dinner, I was given a gift bag with something stuffed into it. Inside was a massive blanket that Mama had made me; it was fleece on one side and plush-lined on the other. At some point, Daisy had told her that I'd had trouble finding fleece blankets big enough to actually use (since I'm not a small man). All I could find in stores in the way of fleece throws was 50x60", which will realistically only cover about the top 2/3 of my body. I end up getting two or three of them and overlapping them, and I had mentioned to Daisy a while back that I wondered if I could get four of them and have Mama sew them all together into a big square, since I can get the 50x60 ones for $3 or so each at Walmart, but getting one that's four times that size (read: big enough to cover my bed) is about $50 or more. It makes no sense. Mama took it upon herself to make me a large blanket with the plush lining as my birthday present. She told me what its dimensions are when I got it, but I can't remember now what they were. It's big, though. More than big enough for what I need. I was, and am, extremely grateful -- especially as it is ten degrees outside right now, and it is cold in the house.
As an aside, when I got home on Saturday, I had it packed in the suitcase. When I unpacked the suitcase and began putting away everything in it (including the coffee), I put the blanket on the couch for a moment as it was the first item on top of everything else. No more than thirty seconds afterward, this happened:
The folded blanket has now become the girls' favorite sleeping spot over the course of the past 36 hours or so, and if they're not in here with me or downstairs on the bed with me, one or both of the girls are sleeping on/with/next to said blanket -- sometimes together and cuddling on it.
Ahem. Anyway.
It was a good night. I did, of course, thank the parents profusely for the beautiful and useful blanket, and I love the pattern on it. I mentioned that, as always, their kindness and generosity overwhelms me -- and I do truly mean that when I say it. I don't want it to come off as trite or phony; these people, all of them, have made me a part of their family. I am genuinely wanted there when I'm there, and I am loved and appreciated as a person and as a future husband/son/brother/uncle/etc. These people mean as much to me as my own family because they are now part of my own family. I cannot tell you how important that is to me, and yes, how much it does indeed overwhelm me.
In the overnight hours, after everyone went to bed, I had to stay up -- one of my promised tasks (and really, the last Christmas present I could give Daisy) was to reformat and reinstall a new OS on Daisy's laptop. She had Windows 7 on it, but even with as much RAM as her computer has (as much as my desktop here), it would constantly hang/freeze/mess up/run very slowly, and whether it had any viruses or not -- I don't know if it did -- there was little else that could be done but wipe it and start anew. She had been having problems with it for months, and those problems slowly got so bad that the computer had been rendered basically unusable. I begged her, long ago, to let me put Linux on it so that she wouldn't have to worry about all of that stuff anymore. As you may know, I've been running several different versions of Linux on all of my machines since 2005 or 2006 -- my desktop has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS/GNU, while my laptops have Linux Mint 13 MATE and Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon, respectively. I'm well-versed in Linux and could probably get paid to work for the Linux Foundation (or whatever) if I wanted to. When her computer became so unstable that it was became pretty much unusable, she finally relented and told me that I could put Linux on it when I was up there over Christmas.
In order to be able to do this, however, I told her that it was very important that she saved and backed up everything she needed off that machine, putting it on discs or on removable flash media, whatever she had to do, because once I wiped her HD, it was gone forever. I stressed the "gone forever" part, because that is indeed important. Daisy is well-versed in computer stuff, what with most of her family doing work somehow related to computer/IT fields, if even in a tangential fashion sometimes. She's had her laptop wiped before by Dad, but I told her this time that it would be different than anything else she's had done -- it was a complete and total wipe of her HD with a completely different, unfamiliar-ish operating system being installed on it. Because of that, anything she needed to keep, she needed to back up. And she needed to make sure she got everything she needed. Most of this stuff consisted of iTunes music she'd bought over the years, thousands of pictures from family trips and the like, and her important documents -- resumes, paperwork, etc.
The backup took forever. Part of it was because said computer kept trying to freeze up or give errors; the other part of it was because Dad had provided her with a portable HD to put her stuff on temporarily, and while it would take all of her pictures, for some reason the computer didn't want to transfer the music or documents to it. She got what she could on there and utilized other means to save her documents and music, but that process itself took many hours. It was probably 1AM before I even sat down with her machine to work on it...and then the first OS I tried to load on it (Ubuntu 11.04, the last one with the GNOME interface included instead of that "Unity" bullshit they use now) half-installed before it failed. Over and over and over again. Luckily, I had a backup OS -- Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon -- which I used and successfully installed over the course of an hour or so. By the time I was done, I had updated her now lightning-fast computer with the newest software and had installed Chrome, Skype, and a few other useful programs she'd need (such as some browser add-ons and AdBlock Plus) to reduce the clutter of everything. When I finished, tired and bleary-eyed, I showed her the basics of how to use it -- Linux Mint operates a lot like old-school Windows systems -- and how to access her files and programs, and we went to bed.
It was good that we'd stayed up late -- not only did we have a long day ahead of us on Friday, but we had to drive back home that night, as she had to be able to sleep quickly, turn around, and be back in Omaha by Saturday evening so she could return to work for the weekend.
What happened on Friday, you may ask? Well, you'll find out in the next post, which will (finally) wrap up this series of recaps.
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