Guess what America’s favorite bike commuting family did today!  We drove to the mall!  Not the far away mall, but the one that is sort of close, that you can bike to.  As Dave drove around the insane madhouse of a parking lot, looking for a place to park there was a lot of, “I can’t believe I let you convince me to drive.  You should have driven!  This is insane!  We should just park at our house and walk!”  And so on.  Call me crazy, but yesterday’s forecast for today was 30-40 and rainy/snowy.  Does that sound like family outing to the mall weather?  Why yes, it does.  In a car.  Of course, it was 50 and sunny, perfect biking weather, but you never know when that weather will change.  PLUS!  We were going to the mall to buy a new computer.  Do you bring home a giant new computer on your bike, when it might rain?  Well according to Dave, you don’t buy your computer at the mall anyway, you order it online.  But I felt the need to have someone wait on us, answer questions, try to upsell us, wheel and deal, etc.  Sadly, the answer to almost all my questions was, “I don’t know.”  And the answer to  “can we get one with these options” was, “Only if you order it online.”  And, “I told you so.”  That last one was from Dave.

Overall, a very disappointing trip to the Apple store.   Except for one exciting thing!  When we got there, I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people, and I was ready to concede that it was a wasted trip, but then I remembered about the fact that I can’t plug a headphone jack into my phone so I decided to ask someone for help with that.   A nice person said I needed a reservation and she could help me make one.  The reservation was for 4:00 pm.  This was at 2:30.  It was then that I understood what the 275 other people in the store were doing.  She asked if I could wait that long and I said, “Well I need to talk to someone about buying a giant computer and a bunch of software, so maybe.”  Then she just took my phone and ran in the back and cleaned out the earphone jack immediately after she helped us make an appointment to talk to a specialist.

Diagnosis, “It had, like, a LOT of lint in it.”  Super glad I did not have to wait until 4:00 pm to figure that out.  And I didn’t even buy a computer!

To make it up to Dave for ruining his non-driving streak, I rode the xtra-cycle to the other apple store and bought all the groceries.