August 07th, 2023

How was your weekend?   Ours was great! And unexpectedly great.  I don't mean unexpected in a depressing way.  It's not as if our weekends are horrible. They aren't.  But normally they are uneventful.   In general we manage to get stuff done and checked off the gotta-do list, run some errands, maybe catch up on some overdue sleep, and probably eat at least one meal out (or take-out).  And then it's Monday again and Tim is at his desk working his job and I'm all over the place working my job and we are looking forward to the weekend once again.

But this past weekend was different.  Not the weather, No, that wasn't different.  It was hot and humid in a way that only Florida in August can be which means that we will very wisely be spending most  of our time inside......somewhere.  But it started out with not one, but two flat tires.  Flat tires are not a good thing.  But they are a real thing.  Flat tires happen.  How poor Tim managed to get two flat tires on his car at the same time while driving in a normal fashion on a normal road is still a mystery. But it's true.   

He knew that it happened immediately.  We had been out running errands and were very close to home at that point so we carefully continued  the few remaining blocks.  Once we pulled into the driveway and got out to look, yup, very flat.  Dang.  But Tim just shrugged and said "good thing I have a spare".  It was late in the day though so the plan was to take care of it the next day.  Saturday morning, while I was outside checking on green growing stuff while Tim was taking care of a housey chore, I noticed that it wasn't just one flat tire, it was two.  Sigh.  When I broke to bad news to Tim, he just shrugged.  "And that's why we have Triple A" he says.  

No longer was this just a "change the tire" situation.  Most people have one spare tire, but few people have two on hand.  We did not either.  So now the car had to be towed.  While Tim was being very "it is what it is" about the situation at hand, I had a giant cash register going off in my head.  Buying New Tires! $$$  Towed to a car related place!  $$$  I fretted very quietly to myself.  Tim kept very calm.  It's who he is, it's what he does.

Turns out, both tires were able to be patched!  Hurrah!  Much more reasonable price. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!   Great!   To say I was relieved would be understating things :)

Then,  I had mentioned recently, that while I hated to say it, I probably needed new sneakers.  My current ones were starting to make my feet hurt which means the innersole was breaking down. Dang.  Once again, here I am thinking $$$.  When I really looked at the shoes, not only was the insole beat to death, there were holes in the uppers and when I flipped them over, in the actual soles too.   Gotta have decent footwear.

So once we had the car back Tim says, "Let's go get you some new shoes!"  Yay!  We headed to the place we almost always go, Peltz!  It's a really big store with lots of shoes of all sorts, sizes, colours and styles and, normally, much better prices than the average store.  I like that. I like that a lot.  What I didn't like was that almost every pair of sneakers in my size that fit and were comfortable, were black.  I really did not want black sneakers.  I know, I know, I'm being too picky.  What difference does it make what colour they are?

Well the last time I bought sneakers, which was, as it turns out, two + years ago, I also had to settle for black shoes and I just plain didn't want to do it again.  We live in a sunshiney place.  I wear light bright colours most  of the time.  I really didn't want heavy, black, dark, depressing shoes again for two more years. please?  So we left and went to another store.  The sneakers I already had were the brand "Sketchers" so Tim decided to just go to the Sketchers store.  My concern was that since it was the Brand store, the price would be higher.  I was wrong.   They were having a back to school sale and even though I'm not going back to school, the sale applied to me too. YAY!  AND then they were also doing a special thing that weekend, buy one pair, get a second pair half price!  AND they had shoes in my size they were every colour, not just black. Woohoo!  I left with two pair of shoes for LESS than the price of one pair anywhere else.  SCORE!  One one pair has kitties on it!  There was some sort of special thing going on with those kitty shoes where part of what you pay for the shoes goes to support pet shelters!  Bonus!

Sunday dawned very sunny, very hot and even more humid.  Like just shy of rain humid. Typical for August in Florida but no less miserable for it.  Once again, we had no plans, but we had learned that a new donut place in town had opened so naturally we had to check it out.  Sunday morning sounded like a great day for donuts!  And eating donuts is an Inside thing!

The new donut shop is called Parlour Donuts out of Illinois and they are very different than standard donuts.  They are more like croissants or perhaps brioche donuts, if you can imagine such a thing and they came in many different varieties, including gluten free, vegan and even Doggie Donuts!  We stood in line, marveling at the options and decided that, to truly experience these new-style donuts, we needed to each select three.  A half dozen, if you please.  And we each chose something different to cover more choices.

I had one called French Toast, which realllly tasted like french toast which was kind of wild.  The cinnamon roll definitely brought the cinnamon and my last one, the Turtle definitely had the caramel and pecans and chocolate that one might expect from a turtle candy.  Tim had turtle cheesecake, lemon and something else, I cannot recall.  All of them were good, very filling, very satisfying, but quite honestly, not a donut.  It's something else, a different species of breakfast pastry. And as such, needs a different name, in my opinion.

We had to sit around digesting for a little bit after that. (I pigged out and had two yesterday but  managed to save one for this morning. Sooooo Good)  And then just started automatically just doing things that need to be done.  Tim worked on one of the last final little details of the project room (family room) and I piddled around doing other small but necessary housey stuff. 

Then Tim finished what he was doing and says, "let's go".  So we got in the car.  It's not unusual for us to, at some point in the weekend, just in the car and go somewhere because Tim needs to just not be in the house for awhile.  Think about it.  He works from home. He spends the majority of his waking hours in one room.  Then, when he's not working at his job, he is working on the house.  So while it's a different room, it's the same building.  Sometimes he just needs to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.  Which is probably why he doesn't mind, occasionally, going to the grocery store, or hardware store or... you get the idea.  

It was already past noon and since it was impromptu, I knew we wouldn't be going that far.  And it wasn't.  We ended up at the Bishop  Science and Nature Museum.  And it was awesome.  It's not a huge place but big enough.  We saw a planetarium show (I LOVE those) and then just  meandered around learning about early Florida inhabitants including those of the prehistoric sort, Florida wildlife and that kind of segued into getting to meet the two  current temporary resident manatees!   It turns out that the Bishop does rehabilitation for injured manatees and once they are healthy again, they are released back into their natural habitat. I like that too.  We spent a couple of hours there and enjoyed every minute, in spite of the feral children whose parents were allowing them to literally race through the place weaving around other visitors and exhibits. Grrrrrr.​

It was nice and cool, it was, surprisingly, not crowded, and there was a free parking garage across the street.  All good things.

So for a weekend where we had NO plans at all, we managed to do a lot and it was all awesome!  And unusual for us ;)  A TREAT for sure!