Success!

I hunted. I caught. I brought back home and set up.

Today I took off from work (and wasn't scheduled at the store), so I had a day to run errands. I didn't get everything I wanted accomplished but I did get quite a bit. I got a late start; I never heard my alarm and didn't wake up till 11 am (I was at a friend's house till 2 am last night, and had taken a cab home, then tried to go through my news reader for awhile because over 700 entries had built up over a couple of days, but finally I had to go to bed, so I was pretty tired.) I knew I'd have lots to carry, so I brought a backpack.

At the bus stop I met a young man who was obviously reading a roleplaying game book (trust me, you get to recognise the format after dealing with as many as I have over the years). I asked him about it, and it turned out to be one of the editions of Dungeons & Dragons, a book on the various planes of existence. We got to talking. I told him I played in a Call of Cthulhu game and had done so since 1991. Turns out he's been playing one campaign of D&D for ten years, so he understood ongoing games. He enjoys Lovecraft ('my favourite person who's dead', as he put it) but had never even come across anyone else who knew about or played the roleplaying game. He'd had a hard time even finding the books. I pointed him to the Rusty Scabbard and Chaosium.com. I happened to be wearing my 'Starkweather-Moore Antarctic Expedition' T-shirt, which refers to the long campaign we had set in Antarctica. He was familiar with the story that it was based upon. So we had a good chat. On the way in to the transit centre his fiancée got on and he was telling her about what we'd been talking about. It was refreshing to talk to someone about roleplaying without totally sounding geeklike. I was waiting for him to ask to play (our gamemaster is very choosy, and I don't think we're looking for another player right now, so I emphasised that we were in our 40s and even one is in her early 50s.) He never asked, but he was happy to talk to someone who had read and understood Lovecraft.

First I went to a store I had not heard of prior to a recommendation from Sqecial Media. It's out on Winchester and Liberty Road and it is called Botany Bay, which entailed getting on a bus with which I was unfamiliar and totally different from the one route I'd pulled up on the computer had been (the bus driver for Eastland suggested the Hamburg one instead, and he was right, it was much easier). There was some confusion as to whether I'd pulled the cord at the right stop (I was right, but got confused when one of the signs said 7th Street and asked the bus driver if we were at Liberty, but she didn't understand, and then once we turned onto Liberty right after that she realised what I said and let me off at the next stop).

Winchester Road (or at least that area) is a collection of automobile garages, home improvement stores, clubs, tattoo parlours, etc. It's kind of run-down looking. But the store was easy to find. It was full of herbs, incenses, jewelry (including body piercing), T-shirts, and a few books. They were friendly and helpful. I found everything I needed except for one thing, which I managed to find in my house way in the back of a cupboard later (I was certain I had some somewhere in the house). So I'm good to go on that project, yay.

Then I went back to the transit centre and onto Richmond Road's bus and went to Walgreen's. I got the hygiene items and contact lens cleaner that I needed, but realised that the one thing I'd forgotten was a new prescription, so I decided to fill the three I need tomorrow and just take the earlier bus. Then I walked over to the transfer point to the Woodhill route (it's just across the street and down a bit, in front of the fire station). I got on the Woodhill bus and got off at the next stop (which is quite a way aways, and on New Circle), and then I went to Office Depot in search of a printer. I am tired of not having a working printer, and had a project I needed to print. I could have gone elsewhere and just printed the character sheets for the game that we'd been working on, but those often get tweaked and I always seem to have to make a special trip to get them printed. So I wanted a fairly inexpensive all-in-one.

I found a Hewlett-Packard Officejet 6500 that was only $100. It prints, copies, scans, and faxes. The salesman was quite helpful (and not my ex, who also works there and was somewhere in the background). He went and got the printer and a cable for it (why is it that printers that use USB cables never come with them? You should have everything you need in the box, period.) I went ahead and got some replacement ink since it comes with starter cartridges that only contain about half the ink. I also got some paper. All of the small stuff went into the backpack, along with the health and beauty aids and the stuff from Botany Bay. Then the fun began--getting everything home on the bus.

Now, in order to get home I had to take the Woodhill bus back to the transit station, catch the Richmond Road one, and then walk home from the library while lugging a large (1 ft x 2 ft x 2 1/2 ft) box, which took up a seat and a bit more, and then although it wasn't hugely heavy, it was fun lugging it the two blocks home. It took awhile to set up (especially the software, which I thought took a rather long time), but everything is working, it wasn't hard to assemble (you have to put the print head in and the cartridges, and of course there's the various packing materials to disengage beforehand). The character sheets look lovely. For another $100 I could have gotten one that duplexed and was wireless, but I don't have a wi-fi network and let's face it, you can re-feed the sheets fairly easily without having to double the price of a printer. I was happy to succeed in figuring out the orientation for printing on two sides the first try. It does have an automatic document feeder, which is nice. The ink dries quickly and is crisp. You can print photos from memory cards straight from the printer. All in all I'm pretty happy. It's also less than half the size of my old printer (an Officejet PSC 500, which was pretty ancient and had stopped working a long time ago). And no, no one paid me to say anything about the printer.

I was supposed to go to the game master's house with sheets in hand and help him with his computer, but he called just as I was going out of the door and told me not to. It was pretty late, and dark, so that was fine with me. I'll go over Thursday, when I'm off next from the store, and we can go over the sheets then.

After that, I just crashed. That was a little before 9 pm and I woke up a little after 2 am and thought I'd write a little.

It was a long day. I wasn't able to go to Gall's for pepper spray (I just ordered it online) or junk the car officially. That will have to wait until maybe Thursday. I'd hate to wait until next Monday because the lines will be long due to people renewing their registration in a new month. Thursday at least might not be so bad as Friday.

Well, that was everything that happened today. I did a good job at hunting quickly; it just takes awhile to get anywhere on the bus, although at least they run every half-hour during the day.

I think I'm too wiped out to go back to the news reader and pare things down. Good night.