The cats behaved well and enjoyed the treat.  Today they seemed to be asking for more; they were sniffing at the bowls I fed them in and meowing at me.  No, you little beggars, that was a special occasion, you’ve got plenty of kitty kibble.   Squirrel’s been letting me pet her more lately–the day before yesterday she even walked onto my lap with all four paws.  That kitten may turn out cuddly yet.

There was no TV watching as the TV is still not hooked up (still haven’t scraped together the $300 deposit).  This is for the best as I’m sure Christmas toy ads have become insanely obnoxious, and I get to miss them this year.  Hooray!

I’m not kidding when I say “everything,” either.  I happened to look at the labels of spaghetti sauces while I was shopping today, and they all had corn syrup.  Seriously.  Tomato sauce doesn’t need sugar.  But I guess the average $5,600,000,000 has to go somewhere…I just wish it didn’t have to be into pointless empty calories.

(And I adore empty calories.  Mmmmm chocolate.  I just like them to be defined and enjoyed as such, not part of freaking spaghetti sauce.)

As a bit of a comupter geek, this frightens me.  It can’t be easy to debug and it has to be blocking some airflow.

It also, however, looks a bit like a Triscuit.

So I don’t know whether to be afraid or hungry.

I also have no problem with Taco Bell. Heck, this post is happening because I went to Taco Bell.

I just have a problem with…ridiculousness.

Usually I go through the drive-through and eat in my car, listening to my own radio instead of Taco Bell’s, but because the drive-through line was long and the dining room was empty, I ate in the dining room today. During that time, I happened to look up, through the window on the other side of which was the drive-through line.

In the drive-through line, a woman was reading a book on her steering wheel…which would have been fine, except…it was something about a Fiber Diet. This led me to consider the fiber content of most of what Taco Bell offers. While I don’t happen to have memorized the nutrition facts of everything, I know that there can’t be much in, say, the nacho cheese sauce. I would guess that she would’ve gotten more fiber by eating the book instead of reading it at Taco Bell.

I have nothing against healthy stuff and nothing against Taco Bell, but the two, when juxtaposed, are laughable.

Taco Bell Crunchwraps: $4/week

Shopping at Borders: $30/week

Baja Fresh: $8/week

The fact that none of the above will kill me: priceless. Some things money can’t buy.

I brewed up a pot of what was meant to be quasi-traditional chai tea (brown sugar instead of regular sugar, since that’s what I had) yesterday…I think around 6 PM.  Being conditioned by the preparation times for headache tea, well, I’m not sure exactly how long it steeped, but…not 3-5 minutes.  It took me a while to drink my way through it since I wasn’t drinking it quickly, probably around 8 PM by the time I got done.  It was, I thought, fairly good…but then I couldn’t sleep once I tried.  I remember being sharply awake at 2:30 AM, so sharply awake that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I actually got to sleep around 4.  I started on waking up at 5, actually hauled myself out of bed a bit after 6…I’m figuring somewhere around two hours’ worth of sleep.

I’ve been dead tired all day and somehow getting stuff done anyway, about as well as any other day.  Managed to line a couple of things up as well as do assignment-type stuff.  Go figure.

After having my wallet out, for purposes of using my credit card at the bookstore, I sat down in the comfortable chairs in the alcove next to the bookstore to do a little perusing of what I’d just thrown money at…skimming one, filling in upcoming events in the other. And then, after an unknown amount of time (I wasn’t really paying attention), I got up, went out to my car, and drove home. Somewhere in there is the dumb part.

Last night, I decided that I didn’t feel like cooking, especially when I didn’t have much in the cupboards to work with. My brain went back and forth between Subway and Burgerville for a while; I eventually decided on Burgerville, because that doesn’t exist in Arizona so I’m also on a countdown for how many of those I’ll have. Maybe ever.

So, I grabbed my purse and walked to Burgerville…it’s not a bad walk at all:

At Burgerville, I realized I didn’t have my wallet. Oops, must’ve left it in the car or the apartment…so I walked back and checked both. Repeatedly. And practically turned my purse inside out. And actually mostly cleaned the front seat of my car to see if it would turn up there. No wallet.

So I thought back through the day…the last place I remembered having it was the university…and since I sat down and relaxed for a while just after having my wallet out, it’s possible that I did a quite dumb thing. So, I got out my phone to call the university and see if they have any live bodies who can check the lost and found or run out to that chair, and realize that the battery is remarkably dead. When I got it plugged in, I found a voice mail, to the effect that someone from the university had tried to call ME about that very thing, because the person who found it was decent enough to turn it in, and if my cell phone had had a charge I would’ve known about it. At least it was somewhere safe, but I didn’t realize it until everything at the university shut down (weekend and end-of-term hours), so I ended up having a great big plate of canned pears and pineapple and a glob of peanut butter for dinner.

Then today, I went out to the university.

My first stop was the campus convenience store, right by the area where I last had the wallet, because I figured they’d know where it would be…they suggested the MU Business Office since that’s where the building’s lost and found is. It wasn’t there; they said that if it had been turned in the day before, being a wallet, they would’ve sent it over to the main security office on the other side of the campus.

So…probably for the best for me to actually know where that is anyway…so I drove over (I was wearing sandals, no ankle support, so of course my ankle acted up).

But, they didn’t have it either, and said things like “wait for a few days for it to turn up.” I was then like “no, I’m not going to wait for a few days for it to turn up, I can’t buy food without it, I can’t fill up my car without it and I need to soon, and I used all my loose change on a parking meter today and have no money to buy a parking permit on another day.” So they had me listen to the voicemail again, to gather that it was specifically from the sub shop…and then called around and found out that my wallet was still at the sub shop. Maybe 50 feet from where I started. Aargh.

So I went back…found an open parking meter with some time already on it…got it. Finally. After driving myself totally up a wall…

There were other things I could’ve done on-campus, but after all this, I was super-frustrated and decided to just do it tomorrow instead of find a regular student parking space, buy a permit, walk back to the Memorial Union or the library…yeah, I’ll deal with that tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes.

Edit: Added pictures, because I can

But then there’s a story like this one that blows the numbers, whatever they might be, out of the water: a fast food manager got shot by a customer who wanted more freaking chili sauce. Fortunately the shots didn’t turn out to be life-threatening. Unfortunately, we live in the kind of society where people shoot each other over condiments.

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