Needful Things

If this were a perfect world, IKEA would sell shoes. Alas! they do not.

Shopping can be a confusing and scary experience. I went to San Marcos to see Margie today. I was there for work during our Central Texas fam tour and learned that the Victoria's Secret outlet store sells bras for $5, and this piece of information has itched around in my brain ever since, accumulating layers of desire and temptation like nacre on a grain of sand, until finally today I gazed upon the flawless pearl and breathed, "Let's to to the Outlet Malls!"

Okay, maybe not so much, I realized after approximately 0.1 minutes of attempting to navigate the parking lot, in which some benighted architect, perhaps consumed with the same egocentric mania that makes the main character of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" such an irredeemable prick, only with a sense of humor, which I must observe Ayn Rand does not appear to possess, has placed a turning circle - that grand institute which embodies everything that is most anarchic and terrifying about Old-World driving. Miraculously, we made it back to I-35 unscathed, and settled for a nice visit to the playscape instead. You can't get $5 bras there, but you can probably get some good drugs, if you know when to go. Curfew's not till 11.

We did, however, make it to Bath and Body Works and to Goodwill. Clothes, cosmetics and shoes are the Holy Trinity of balms for a broken heart. So that's two down, and I'm going to IKEA with Robbie tomorrow, even though he complained that the bed be bought there over a year ago is now falling apart; and I had to point out that we were after all drunk when we assembled it. He needs a new coffeemaker, which hopefully won't suffer the same fate.

I figure if I pour enough margaritas into him, I can get him into a shoe store.

Urban Exploration, Part Whatever

The spectacularly breathtaking Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. building in downtown Syracuse.

Why yes, that is 100% chrome trim!

Last time I was in town we didn't visit downtown Syracuse, and I was only vaguely aware that there was such a place. But there is, and it's really pretty amazing.

Austin has some really cool historic downtown buildings from the late nineteenth century, but none of them are very big. Syracuse was a fairly major port along the Erie Canal and so its older downtown buildings are quite large, including several turn-of-the-century skyscrapers. Sadly, the Oswego Canal came to bypass the city in the early 1900s; and while you'd think the original location of the Erie Canal would simply have been redesignated as a business route,* it was actually filled in and is now Erie Blvd.

The weighlock, a tollbooth by the side of the canal where boats were weighed and taxed based on the amount of cargo they were carrying, now serves as a museum, so my dad and I went there today. Then we wandered around downtown for a while.

Here are some pictures!

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*hellllp meeeeeeeeee