3:00 snapshot #667
We slept in again, to the almost unconscionable hour of 8:30. Alexis can go without breakfast (in fact, she rarely eats it, claiming her appetite just isn't there) so I had a couple handfuls of nuts and some expensive Mexican blackberries before we set out. The world was eerily foggy, so we headed to Franklin Park; the fog was caused by warm air reacting with the snow (or something like that) and Franklin Park has lots of open fields where that happens a lot. I tried to restrain myself from taking photos, since I always overdo it, I have no daily photo project (except the snapshot), and Alexis would be taking pictures anyway. I still took some.
Places where there was a lot of ice or snow, like Scarboro pond, were heavy with fog.
In the higher places there was less.
It began to rain, thickening the fog. Strangely, the sun got stronger at about this time.
As we drove off, rain pelted the windshield while sunlight streamed into the back.
After a lunch of eggs with ham and avocado (gain weight now! ask me how!) I went to the used record store to get rid of a bunch of singles and ten inches, while Alexis set off to the laundromat (our dryer is broken).
I was kind of surprised that the used record store was still open, and it seemed like they hadn't changed much since the last tie I had been in there 10 or 15 years ago. They had added shelves of DVDs but kept tons of VHS tapes, as well as audio cassettes (relegated to the back room) compact discs, and the backbone of the place: vinyl records. The guy (possibly the owner) looked at my records and said, "I don't know, what do you want for them? I can't tell if they're worth a dollar or a hundred dollars." I told him honestly that I had no idea how much they were worth (I kind of expected him to be the expert telling me how much they were worth and offering me a fraction of their value; I used to work in a comic book store, I know the routine.) I probably spent 200 dollars on them originally; I accepted 30 dollars in trade for them, then had to try to find something I actually wanted to bring home.
I didn't even look at any of the music, except for a bin of expensive recent releases, on super-thick vinyl for record nerds. Since I'd gone in the place to dump a bunch of music, I couldn't see bringing any back with me. I looked through all the DVDs and found some things that I was kind of interested in, but kept telling myself that I could watch them on Netflix and not have to store the thing forever. I found the place where the TV shows on DVD were, and that was even worse. Someone will buy a DVD of "Survivor?" I was looking for something that I know I would watch over and over again, like the Simpsons, and had a hard time seeing anything I would want to watch once. The whole experience was depressing me really heavily--at one point I caught a whiff of dusty old record jackets, and the smell made me so sad I wanted to run away. I ended up with season 6 of the Simpsons, in the stupid novelty case that looks like Homer's head, and a copy of "Kingdom of the Spiders," since I defend it so often I feel I should own it.
Until the next time I move and just give all this crap away.