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Strip MallsHumanity i love you because Sunday, January 21, 2001 I'd offered to ride with Jack down to Olympia and back. This turned out not to have been such a good notion! Saturday, around noon, I saw Jack and his daughter A----- getting out of the truck, parked across the street. A----- looked upset, so I went to the front door to find out what was wrong. I thought she was ill, or needed to use the bathroom. It turned out she was having a tantrum because her dad refused to stop at the Jack in the Box down on Broadway (hangout of homeless youth, all her buds from when she was on the lam) so that she could bum a cigarette from somebody! If he hadn't needed to stop and pick me up this wouldn't have been an issue; he'd have just kept driving no matter what. I grabbed my jacket and purse. But A----, after yelling and screaming, stalked off down the street towards the grocery store. After she was out of sight, Jack and I got in and drove after her. She was still next to the store, and consented to get in the truck when we pulled up alongside her. Impulse control has never been her strong suit! Even as we were on the entrance ramp to the highway, she continued ranting about how her father gave her no credit for the efforts she's been making, how she hated him, how all she wanted was a damn cigarette, and so on. As we drove south, Jack suggested that she could try for a cigarette when we stopped to get something to eat. I thought we'd stop around Fife, but that was too long to wait, I guess. We stopped at a Denny's in Tukwila. A---- walked off to find somewhere to bum a smoke, and joined us inside after she suceeded. What a scene!
When we got to Olympia, H---- was almost ready. A----- got the notion that Jack should give her money so that she and her mom could go see a movie, but Jack wasn't going for that. Another tantrum, of course. Finally we got out of there. Jack proposed that we take the long way home, stopping at pawn shops and thrift stores on the way. I was agreeable. We stopped at a series of odd stores, including a y2k survivalist store that was going out of business in Yelm. A very odd mixture here: plastic barrels, water filtration units, and office supplies! There was also a fairly nice new-agey type of store in Yelm. I really liked the cut-velvet scarves and dresses there (though the dresses were probably all too small). Yelm is an odd mixture of a town; overlaid on the rural cowboys and loggers is a layer of cultists, brought there when JZ Knight made the town her headquarters. South of Tacoma we visited a series of thrift stores and outlet stores. I think there must be a place near there where Costco gets rid of returns and such, since there were mysterious boxes of Kirkland Signature stuff for sale in both types of stores. One place that had just opened up had a DVD player that would play all regions disks. I was tempted, but didn't get it. We ended up not getting to my place until evening. I think H---- was disappointed that we didn't do anything specifically "fun," but I'd enjoyed most of the day. Jack and I slept in the living room, and we sent H---- to sleep in my bed. The experiment of sleeping in the new loveseat recliner worked out well! It wasn't quite as comfortable for Jack as his own chair is (he loves that chair) but he said it was better than my bed, or the recliner at his folks place. I liked being able to curl up next to him -- and I was glad this sleeping solution worked! In an ideal world I would have brought Jack along when I was shopping for this furniture, but that hadn't been possible. Plus, that would have meant that Jack would know exactly how much the thing cost, which would have bothered him, I think.
Jack and H---- weren't able to stick around for long this morning; he had a Vikingcon meeting scheduled for five o'clock in Bellingham, so he needed to get to Olympia and switch daughters, then drive north again. |
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