The 40 Year Old Hoya

Stress Relief Through Commerce

The day began with a continuation of stress from my dreams, which were kinda stressy; stepped off the scale up a pound (given the birthday week festivities, I can live with that); walked out the door without my lunch; walked into work with a headache and a lot of crap to fit into a very small window.

I’ll cop to Best Buy at lunch; season 11 of the Simpsons was on sale for $12.99, as was the first season of Burn Notice, so I splurged.  Made me feel a little better.  I am a strong proponent of shopping therapy.  And so that spilled over to my trip home, where - with a scant two days to go until I lift off for San Diego, I remembered that I lacked a critical item for my trip.

Luggage.

The little bag simply wore out.  The big bag had an uncorrectable handle blowout two trips ago.  This left the loaner from my Lady Love, a small clutch of gym bags, and the big brown leather traditional suitcase, no wheels - the Madrid Special (so named because once upon a time, I went to Albany, NY and it went to Madrid, only to return six weeks later no worse for wear).

Target has (to be polite) a luggage selection that sucks so hard, the bags pack themselves; so I figured ‘what the hell, I’ll cruise Wal-Mart’ and lo and behold, I scored a nice 5 piece American Tourister matched set for an unsucking $64.  And tomorrow, I’ll pack those babies and, as Jackie Gleason was overheard to say a time or two, awaaaaaay we go.

Meanwhile, I’m collecting writing fragments for my travels; need to make some e-mail notifications of wheres and whens, make a couple last-minute purchases, print a couple of last-minute travel documents and set up a cab for Wednesday morning.  Then, I work as long as it takes tomorrow to complete key tasks and turnover deadline items (now with 82% more expense report.)