So I was weed whacking and ran out of the little containers of cord. I had a couple of other things in mind that I need to get from the housewares store and we also needed gas in the car so off I went.
First I ran into some serious traffic right down the street at the zoo. Was something going on there? I don't know but the traffic around the zoo was crazy. I went over Amherst St to Elmwood and up to the Valu Home store. That was a bust. They didn't have what I wanted and left. I went out the parking lot and immediately got caught in a traffic jam. Apparently there was an accident at Elmwood and Hertel and I waited through a couple of lights for it to clear but then a large semi truck decided to back up into a loading dock a little further down Elmwood which stopped everything again. The truck actually parked itself in the right lane as it went up against the dock as far as it could. Another couple of lights wait.
Finally I got into Home Depot which was very crowded. I found my weed whacker stuff and got some Drano but they didn't have the weeder tool that Becky wanted or the wheel barrel tire replacement I needed. On the way home I got gas.
Over the past few years I've really learned to adjust to retirement and going out to stores, etc. It's now hard to believe that we so often went out to do our shopping after work or on weekends. Whenever we had the time. Last week I also went out driving around the suburbs for some medical appointments that had to be made in the afternoon rather than my usual morning slots. The driving out there was crazy. I've forgotten how intense afternoon and rush hour traffic can be. It has also been the pandemic in addition to my retirement that has affected my driving experiences. Because of my respiratory problems several years ago Becky insisted on doing the shopping. It also made sense because she was going out every day to her studio and on her way home she could drive by Dash's or the Co-Op and pick one to shop for the day. We also used the online shopping and pickup at Wegman's and also sometimes had Whole Foods delivered. We even shopped online at Walgreen's and had stuff delivered. It was almost a whole year before I even ventured out to the suburbs to do some shopping of any kind.
Oh well, it could be worse.
And then I think about all the running around we did raising a family and working crazy schedules that went on for decades. All of our shopping was done frantically after work or squeezed into the weekends. I remember how happy we were when we finally got a second car which of course became critical as the kids got older. We drove them to school in the mornings and then to work. I did like when I worked at the downtown pubic library for a few years and had the option to ride the subway downtown every day. That was nice.
It's been two years now since we downsized to one car and it has worked out OK for us but probably because a significant amount of that time has been in the pandemic world where we were not going out very much anyway.
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