tales of the directionally challenged... and the occasionally unlucky
 
so there i was heading down the road after my haircut. scott had the kids -- ALL of the kids -- and i was flying solo for a change. this doesn’t happen much, so i was considering my options. there was frozen milk in the freezer, so i had a little bit of time on my hands to do with whatever i pleased.
 
but all i really wanted to do was just go home and chill out.
 
then the practical side of my head kicked in and got me to thinking about how fast i could get a few errands run if i didn’t have to get two little girls and a baby out of the van before running said errands.
 
granted, i didn’t exactly FEEL like running errands, but it made so much sense! why waste this golden opportunity? i didn’t need to do much: just get some primer from home depot, return something to another store, and maybe pop into a third store just to see what there was to see simply because i had the freedom to do so without my entourage.
 
(don’t get me wrong. i dig the members of my entourage. and i am determined not to let the increasing size of my entourage dissuade me from leading my life or doing things i want to do. so i still try to scale small mountains in our day-to-day lives in spite of the baby carrier, stroller, or potty breaks. but i will admit that there are often places i want to drop into just to look around and i talk myself out of it simply because the cost-benefit analysis i perform in my head tells me it’s just not worth the extra work!)
 
so i went against my desires and opted to run the errands after all.
 
that is when everything began to go wrong.
 
i knew where i was, geographically. i knew where i was headed. and yet a sign i saw confused me momentarily and i turned onto a highway that was unnecessary for dumping me out onto the correct road for the correct store. but i was off in dreamland thinking of what i needed to get and what i needed to do, and i had driven several miles down the road before my brain began working and informed me that i was headed the wrong way!
 
no sweat, i thought, since i have my trusty GPS in the car. (i stink at figuring out the shortest distance between two points when i’m at a different starting point than usual.) so i took the GPS’s advice, turned here, turned there, and off i went, following my trusty garmin... blindly.
 
then something happened that i wasn’t expecting. an exit it told me to take was not listed on the road sign as the same one garmin was referring to. suddenly i was seeing other signs all over the place, in rapid succession, all referencing exits that garmin was unaware of. (garmin wasn’t the problem. my outdated GPS maps were. these were newly built exits opened in the last couple of weeks.)
 
and then the worst moment of all came. i was at an intersection (after going through an unavoidable TOLL BOOTH mind you!) that had no good option available to me. i could not go straight and make a u-turn. i could, however, take a left... AND DRIVE 15 MILES TO MAKE A U-TURN. or i could take a right... AND DRIVE 16 MILES TO MAKE A U-TURN. all to come back and start all over again.
 
i was beyond angry. beyond ticked. beyond frustrated. i was, shall we say... peeved? no. that doesn’t do it justice either. the other “p” word would be a more accurate description. i called scott just to fuss about my bad luck... cussing a little along the way... hitting my steering wheel... wanting desperately to throw something! but also calling him to seek justification for making an illegal u-turn in the cops-only turn-arounds on the highway.
 
sadly, mr. do-the-right-thing guy gave me none and told me that i should not break the law to avoid a 30-minute detour to my plans.
 
and so i journeyed on, angrier by the minute. in 15 miles, i exited, PAYED THE FREAKING TOLL to get off the highway. made a u-turn. PAYED THE FREAKING TOLL to get back ON the highway. and drove another 15 minutes in the direction from which i just came.
 
all in order to maximize my freedom and make use of my time while my children were occupied with scooter the babysitter. all so that i could “zip in” to home depot for ONE MEASLY TWO-GALLON CAN OF PRIMER.
 
so there’s two hours of my life that i’ll never get back due to my own bad luck and my very bad sense of direction.
 
i really hate it when being an idiot wastes my non-existent spare time!
 
oh well. at least a day after the fact, i can find comedy in the situation!
 
but then the bad luck continued today. i drove in tandem with a friend all the way to poughkeepsie. (about an hour’s drive.) doesn’t sound like much, but i’m pretty spoiled about being able to get everything within 15 minutes of my house. anyway, we got to poughkeepsie, lugged all our kids into the mall to see the free kids’ movie, all to find out that the theater never received the movie and there is no kids’ movie to watch at all. (except one about dragons and witches and scary, dark stuff)
 
so we took them into the target in the mall, let them pick out a $5 movie from the rack, took them to mcdonald’s for happy meals (and the all-important beanie baby toy that i have 8 gillion of), and then let them watch their newly acquired movies in the car while we drove home. (mine had to sit in my idling car polluting the environment for another half hour upon arrival to finish said movie!) i was less than thrilled to have driven around for 2 hours of today in order to shop at a target for a $5 movie when i could have gone to 2 other targets, both within 15 minutes of my house.
 
but it’s not all bad. tonight i attended a national night out thing on post and won a $50 home depot gift card, so maybe my luck is on the upswing! :)
 
Monday, August 3, 2009