saturday sale

Today the pawn shop that my friend Jacob works at had a crazy one day sale: of course we went to check it out. It was packed and there was tons of stuff to be had. We went with the intention of Braeden and Jarrod buying an electric guitar, which Braeden did (electric batman guitar, amp, cords, pedal, case, strings, and guitar stand all for under $200), but Jarrod found a beautiful mandolin with which he became enamored and then purchased himself. Me? I bought a vacuum. I had told Jacob that I was in the market for a vacuum (I don't have one at the Grape Escape and consequently my house was slowly being taken over by roving dust bunnies) and Jacob assured me that he had just the item for me: a durable yellow vacuum that he'd been using to vacuum the shop at the end of each day. It was $5 or $10 more expensive than most of the other vacuums, but he said it worked really well. So I bought it. And I have no regrets. While Braeden was on the couch restringing his new guitar I vacuumed my two area rugs, both entrance rugs, then fitted the tube on and vacuumed almost all the baseboards in the house. So satisfying.

Later after work Gloria came over and she and Braeden and I just hung out. I love when Gloria comes over and just hangs out and it's just the three of us and it is peaceful and perfect and we can all do different things but it doesn't matter because we are all just there together. We played this game Careers that I bought at Stuff like a month ago. It's basically like the game of Life but not as colorful and, as the name suggests, career oriented. Also, it was totally sexist. The premise of the game is that each player creates their own formula for success based on units of happiness, fame, and money. Then you travel around the board in various ways to earn these units. Certain things give you more units of happiness or fame than others, though. For example, on the Space track, being the first woman on the moon gives you 2 Fame points and 4 Happiness points, but being the first man on Mars is worth 16 Fame and meeting a mars lady gives you 10 Happiness. Herm... In the Teaching track you get 4 Happiness points when the new principal is a bachelor, and in Big Business you get 4 Happiness points for having lunch with your secretary. Pretty hilarious stuff. For the most part it was pretty fun to play. We came up with a few modifications of our own that we'll implement next time we play.

I love Iowa.