Nebulous Mooch

We were supposed to fly out of Tampa at 11:22 yesterday morning, but our plane needed repairs. After hours of waiting and standing in lines, we finally ended up on a flight that left at about 6:50 in the evening. Spending all that time in the airport can be great for developing endurance and honing your observation skills.

During my time there I learned that when someone announces a code 3 no one is allowed to leave the security area, but if there is a code 10 everyone just ignores it.

The airport floors are extremely shiny. The airport also appears to be sloped. No wait, that’s just my sloppy photography skills.

People at the airport do a lot of waiting and reading while waiting. (I guess I always knew that.)

Once you realize it will be hours before your plane leaves it’s much nicer to hang out by the airport hotel’s swimming pool.

I’m having a lazy posting day so here are some pictures of us to remind you what we look like.

I come from a long line of printer obsessed people. Well that’s not exactly true. Printers haven’t been around long enough for that to be true, but my parents do have five printers. When my husband reorganized my father’s studio they were reluctant to get rid of any of their printers. Everyone had a specific and very important function.

I understand this love for printers. I’ve had the same printer for years and years. It was a cheap printer, but it never gave me a problem. Let’s call him Melvin. Melvin was well-behaved and friendly–well as friendly as an inanimate object can be. One day Melvin stopped working. I needed a scanner anyway so I decided to buy a new printer. Let’s call him Brad.

I didn’t like Brad one bit. He took up too much space and was really into himself. Melvin sat under my bed gathering dust while Brad sucked all the money from my bank account with his super expensive ink habit. Yesterday, when I noticed that Brad was already starting to whine about wanting more ink….AGAIN, I decided I needed to do something about this problem. I was going to fix Melvin.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not mechanical. My idea of fixing something is bashing it around a bit and then seeing if it’s started working. The idea being that if I hit it in just the right place some loose parts will magically fall into place and it will start working again. Sometimes that actually works, but usually it doesn’t.

I decided to take Melvin apart. It didn’t start out well. There was lots of pulling and twisting and hitting and slamming before I got myself under control and found a video explaining how to fix him. In the video the person gives specific instructions not to remove certain items from inside your printer. Ooops….I already removed those items in my early thrashing around stage of my repair job.

Now that Melvin is in pieces on the dinning table there are a few pieces that I don’t know what to do with. I just don’t know where all these little springs came from. This morning when I suggested that the springs were so small they must not be important my husband laughed and told me that if I put it back together wrong I’d end up with ink spilling all over the place when I tried to print something.

I guess Melvin is ready for the trash, but I’m still not ready to give him up. Of all my regrets taking Melvin apart without proper instructions is my biggest.

Our car, Frank (that’s his name), broke down this weekend. It would’ve been all right if we were the kind of people who didn’t need to go anywhere on the weekend, but unfortunately most of our going happens on the weekends.

My husband thought it was the alternator. I didn’t even know Frank had one of those. Anyway after some thought and a lot of oh-no-what-are-we-going-to-do’s on my part we decided to rent a car. We got a Renault Clio from the car rental place. It looked something like this:

Yes the windows really are that shiny in person. I have pictures to prove it.

Having Clio around was a luxury. We started getting used to the power steering and working radio. Clio even had a CD player. Imagine that! But, Frank was starting to get jealous so Clio had to leave after only a few days.

We took Frank to the mechanic today. Don’t worry he’s made a full recovery.

We went to the science museum last week. My husband didn’t really want to go. I could tell because he kept asking if maybe there was somewhere else I wanted to go. I insisted and as usual once we got there he had a blast. I was tired and ready to leave and he kept saying let’s just look at this one last exhibit before we go.

Here’s a list of what I learned at the science museum.

• You can’t use tripods in a the museum.
• Even though he was told not to use the tripod in the museum my husband will continue to use his tripod.
• I am apparently a night owl.
• Most old medical equipment looks suspiciously like a torture device.
• Read the sign before you randomly try to walk into a room.
• Make sure you pay attention to where you’re going when you wonder off looking for the bathrooms so you know how to get back.
• My hand print is unreadable.
• I am not skilled at looking straight ahead.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took while we were there.

My Grandmother

My Sister

Have you ever watched The Price is Right? When we used to do our laundry in the local laundromat The Price is Right was always blaring from the two televisions at either end of the establishment. For those of you who are lucky enough to never have heard of The Price of Right I’ll just say that it’s a game show that’s been on for a very long time. What shocked me is that the other customers in the laundromat seemed completely engrossed in the show. Anyway, one thing about the show that always got on my nerves was when a car was the prize the announcer would always say, “A neeeeeeewwwwww caaaaaarrrrrr!” I hated that. I know winning a new car is exciting, but must he say it in such an annoying manner.

We didn’t win a new car, but decided to buy an old car to make our trips to Florida a bit easier. There’s nothing I hate more than shopping for a car. Actually that’s not true. I think I hate getting a cavity filled more. Oh yeah, and there was that totally unnecessary uterus vacuuming. That was pretty bad too. So when I put it into prespective I guess car shopping isn’t that bad.

My husband is so excited about our new car that he couldn’t wait to have me take a picture of him climbing into it.

I haven’t posted pictures in a very long time. Here are some I took last weekend.