The president or the illegal aliens?  Hold that thought, I’ll come back to it.

I met Amanda for lunch at the Chick-Fil-A across from the mall.  It reminded me how much I hate driving through Wilmington during key traffic hours.  One great advantage to working from home is that it affords me the luxury of forgetting that.  There’s no really good way to get from our place to the mall area during lunchtime traffic.  If we take Kerr all the way we have to wait forever in crossing Market.  The other option is to go down 40 to College, but that’s also very crowded.  I think the best bet is to take 40 to College (therefore driving over Market) then ditch College ASAP for Kerr.  From there you can take Randall Parkway to Independance (thus, to the mall area, bypassing Oleander as well) or take Kerr to Wrightsville, a left at the light, right onto Floral and there you are at the back of the shopping center with the Chick-Fil-A.

Okay, that was boring to a lot of people, but consider it free advice when you happen to be trying to get to the mall during lunch one day in Wilmington.  Then you’ll thank me.

After work, Amanda and I went to the Wal-Mart to pick up a bunch of stuff.  One thing we picked up, and subsequently left, was a shower curtain rod.  I remembered that when I returned the cart we used, there were only two others, which meant the carts had been taken inside shortly before that.  Heading out from home, I got to the cart rack and was pleasantly not too surprised to see a bunch of carts in the erstwhile nearly empty queue, found our cart with the rod still in it and went back on home.

Amanda had offered to ride with me, but I didn’t see the point.  I did take Bruce though.  He loves riding in the car.  When you let him out front, if the first thing he does isn’t to pee on a bush or a particularly offensive blade of grass, he heads for the car and waits to be let in.  We’ve had him start wandering down the street before, and all we have to do is open the door to catch him.  He jumps right on in.

When we were unloading groceries and such, Amanda dropped a glass bottle of peanuts I’d gotten.  Fortunately it didn’t break, but the lid did, with the exception of the seal.  Damn good seal, huh?  She’s had a number of incidents since we moved here.  There was a bowl that had a crack in it already, so that wasn’t her doing, and she’d packed a few glass cups inside each other and two of them broke when she took them apart.  On Friday she dropped one of the monogrammed glasses Kim, her cousin (well, her mom’s cousin, but they never specify much in that clan) who died of cancer, had given to us for our wedding.  It only cracked and she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, so it’s sitting on a bookshelf with some momentos now.  I vaguely remember Amanda having such luck before, but I don’t think we really had any incidents since we moved to Wilmington until now.

Amanda hung a few pictures in the bedroom.   Actually, she hung the one I printed and got her grandfather to frame for Christmas last year (one we took just messing around with the camera that turned out pretty nice) a few days ago.  Tonight she hung a print and the picture of us at the beach from the trip where we got engaged that Anna had given us for the Christmas prior to the aforementioned one.

I was playing some Rome while Amanda was watching TV.  She was watching a rerun of the series finale of Seventh Heaven (which just ended last week) so she let the DVR record How I Met Your Mother, a show we’ve both come to really enjoy.  It’s not Lost or The Office, but it’s a good little sitcom.  Anyway, we were gearing up to watch it, and we noticed that King of Queens, which came on before it, ran fifteen minutes into the recording.  This was because Presidet Bush decided it’d be a nice night to discuss the plan he’s come up with for all the illegal immigration, announcing that he’s going to use the National Guard to help close up the border.  So we got half of How I Met Your Mother.  We didn’t get to see if Robin said yes to Ted and we didn’t get to see Marshall and Lily have their discussion or fight or whatever happened to them.  All we know (because we caught the very end) is that Ted and Marshall were sitting on a stoop in the rain at the end of the show.  Dammit!

So should I be mad at the president for pushing all network programming back fifteen minutes, or should I be mad at all the illegal aliens who caused the situation and made the president decide Monday night was a good time to give a speech?

You know, it’s not like there aren’t about thirty 24-hour news stations these days.  It’s just wrong to interrupt season finale week with a news address that would be reported on the internet and shown, discussed and dissected on CNN all tomorrow anyway.  So now I have to wait for a rerun to see what happened on my show.  It’s just not right.