Goose play dates, racoons, wild goose chases, etc.

It's been yet another interesting day. After a long series of events (and a nice day with Grandmother and going out to our favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner), evening came and I began the wild goose chase. In hindsight, it is strangely appropriate that one of the first things I saw while on my search for It was a group of about 4 adult Canadian geese shepherding along a little flock of 10-20 baby geese. Never seen a goose play group before!

The first stop on my wild goose chase was the mall. I figured that if anyone was going to have It, a somewhat specialized item, they would. Turns out the mall had a little under 20 minutes until closing time when I got there. And, It was nowhere to be found. I suppose it wasn't a total waste, though, since I got in some exercise walking around the outside of the mall way back to where I'd parked since the store I'd parked by in the first place had closed.

I then headed to another location in search of It, a place that closed an hour later than the mall. I had a little more time there, and found a possible version of It, but at about twice the price I would have expected, and generally deficient otherwise by virtue of not being the real It. I did find a great sale on something else I wanted, but my orders were to secure It before returning home. That left me with two places to go: Wal-mart or a grocery store.

I tried the grocery store first. They had some relatives of It ("cousins It"? tee hee hee . . .), but nothing close enough to pass inspection back home. And so it came down to Wal-mart. Wal-mart had exactly the same almost-It I'd seen before, but for about half the price. As it was approaching (or past) 11 p.m. at that point, it seemed prudent to take the almost-It and get out while I still could. I still had to fight off a purse that wanted me to take it home as well as several other items before finally escaping with the almost-It and a few other things that totaled up to a few cents less than I would have paid at the first store for the same almost-It.

On the way home, I spotted my third live raccoon in Ohio; this one helped explain why I see so many dead ones: it was waddling slowly across the road, daring me to hit it. Thankfully, the road was quite bare, so between the raccoon's microscopic pace increase and my room to swerve, we both came out of the encounter alive.

All in all, quite the wild goose chase; I'll be curious to see what the inspector thinks of the almost-It sometime in the morning. For now, though, time to go have a nice shower and get some rest.