Road Trip

I'm going to try and make this post short because I am tired and need to drive home tomorrow. Home from home. Get it? No? Let me explain. My parents bought a house in Malone, NY. That's where I am right now. I drove up mostly to see if I could do it, and so far so good! Yesterday's trip up went smoothly with no hiccups. I guess that's not very exciting to blog about, is it? But better for me, because I don't do well under pressure, especially when I'm by myself. Driving the scenic mountain route was a bit harrowing in the dark. It was the first time I've driven up solo, AND in the dark. Generally we drive up in the early morning when it starts out dark and then gets light. It was very strange to start out in the light and have it get dark.

At any rate, the trip went well. Took me just about 6 hours, and I only made 3 potty stops. Anyway, on to what we did today. We peeled wallpaper off the wall of "the office." Yes. This house is HUGE. Let me put it this way: right now I live in a stinky little 2-br apartment. It's roughly 700 square feet. The living room in the house is about 650 square feet. JUST THE LIVING ROOM. Extend the living room about four feet wider, and OUR ENTIRE APARTMENT can fit inside it. Did I mention that this house is huge? Yeah. So, keeping that in mind, you can see how it took us an entire day to steam and peel wall paper off of two walls in one room. Luckily, only those two walls in that room had wall paper to begin with, which means it only needs to be cleaned, spackled, and painted.

But there are give or take 15 more rooms that need "fixing." Thankfully, the bedrooms do not have wall paper on the walls. Just god awful ugly paint colors. Oh, and each room (Did I mention there are 7 bedrooms?) has a different border up by the ceiling. The room I'm in now has lovely olive drab walls and a tan and pink daffodil border.

Enough decor. Which means end of post. There's nothing else really juicy to tell. We ate at the Chinese buffet and OMG it is super awesome. Then we walked over to walk through Aldi's, which is a small, cheap, grocery store. Then we went to Walmart (Wally world, anyone?) to pick up a bunk bed (we are keeping it as 2 twins, one for my bro, and one for Caelyn), and some other things. I went to swipe my card, and horror of all horrors. It was declined. We tried every way imaginable to swipe it in, manually enter the numbers. Nothing. I owe my dad a mattress or something. Then we went to Price Chopper (the North Country equivalent to Shop Rite or Pathmark or A&P) to pick up some beer. I figured I'd give my card another chance. Still a no go. WTF.

When we got back to the house I immediately called customer service and demanded to know why my card (currently with no previous balance) was declined. Well, apparently, they blocked the purchase because it seemed suspicious, and I got it all fixed when I called and told them that yes, it was me in possession of my own card. I guess being more than 300 miles away from your billing zip code, making a rather large purchase (I don't really use it for much), shot up a little warning flag for them. Which is good, I guess, because I could have called and had someone tell me that it was run up to the limit and that's why it was declined. So yeah, good it wasn't thieved or anything, but not good for me when I'm at the checkout and the line behind me is growing longer, and I'm that asshole that keeps insisting the card is good when it obviously isn't going through.

So that was my one moment of excitement today. Aside from amazing Chinese buffet. Did I say that I was going to try and keep this short? I guess I didn't try hard enough. I'm going to TRY (hopefully better than I tried here) to get up early enough to get home before Caelyn gets home. I told her I'd be home when she got home, but we'll see what the morning brings. I'm praying that driving in complete daylight will make the trip through the mountains a little bit easier than in the pitch blackness (Oh, those high beams ARE good for something! And God bless cruise control!)