Yesterday (Tuesday) ended up being a comedy of errors of epic proportions. It wasn't the worst day ever. It just ended up being much less than I had hoped, on many fronts.
It began well. Or kind of well. It was my day off and I needed to go help my son Sam at 8:00 with a ride over to the tire repair place, so I decided to get up early and get to the gym. For whatever reason, I didn't get out the door until nearly 6:40 and I knew that would not be enough time to complete my entire workout and make it to help Sam at 8. I ended up shortening the workout. That never pleases me. I figure if I made the effort to go at all, I should do a complete workout. But at least I got some exercise in, so not a bad start.
I made it to Sam's apartment complex just after 8, where we discovered that his spare wasn't flat after all (as he'd thought), and so we removed the flat tire, put the spare on, and I followed him to Discount Tire. No problems there.
I went home and began looking up places to buy decorative rock for landscaping. I had finished digging out the parking strip on Saturday, and so I was anxious to get the job completed. I found out that the place where we bought the specific rocks that we used a couple of years ago to redo our parking strip at our old house was out of business. After finding out that the place I'd gotten them before was out of business, I began to search for places that carried the same kind of rock. I narrowed in on a place in Magna and wrote down the address along with a couple of other possible vendors.
Next on the agenda was that both Ann and I needed haircuts. I dropped her off at Fantastic Sam's where she had gotten a quality haircut the last time she got it cut, while I headed across the street to a new barbershop/salon that was over there. It was 10:10 by this time, but when I arrived at the place on the other side of the street, even though their sign said that their hours began at 10, there wasn't a single soul inside the locked place. I thought about going down the street a few blocks to another place I knew of, but thought that Ann would be done way before me if I did so and wouldn't know where I was, so I headed back to Fantastic Sam's to wait for her. I sat there in the 4runner, looking at a coupon book until 10:30. At that time, she finally appeared at the door, so I went in, only to find that she's struck up a friendship with a couple of old ladies, one on oxygen, and was just waiting to hold the door open for them. When I came in and found out that she hadn't had her haircut yet (because they were calling her back at that time to get it started), she said that I could hold the door open for the ladies. I was more than happy to do so, but I stood their looking dumb for about five minutes while one of the ladies looked for a punch card or something in her purse. Finally I went outside and stood, thinking that when they made it to the door, I could pull it open from the outside, which is what I did.
After that, I wandered up and down the strip mall, then climbed back into the 4runner and started reading the coupon book. It actually looked like there was quite a few great places with coupons that we should try. I was looking forward to later in the day driving up to Tremonton and having lunch--after the haircuts and rocks. The place we were heading for wasn't one of the coupon places, but some place I had bought a hot fudge shake at once on a drive down from Idaho--and I had remembered that shake with fondness.
When Ann got done and came out, I told her about not getting my haircut, and she told me that since I had planned on stopping home to change shirts (I can't stand the itchiness of the cut hairs that get inside my shirts), she had not used the restroom and would need to stop somewhere. I had thought I would stop at that second hair cutting place, but instead headed further up the road to the library, a place with a restroom. When she came out, we backtracked to the hair cutting place, called "Authentic Cuts". I went inside while Ann waited outside in the car. There was one barber. There was a guy getting his hair cut, and a teenager waiting. I sat and watched the barber and his customer, heavily involved in a conversation, and the barber shaving the guy's neck, up and down, up and down for about five minutes. I never knew it could take that long to shave a neck. I knew then that the barber wanted to continue the conversation with the customer and was trying to delay finishing. I left. "Let's go see if we can find rocks," I said.
We drove to the vicinity of the first one on my list (in Magna), the one that supposedly had rocks that looked like the ones we had purchased the last time. The address took us to a neighborhood, not some kind of lot with rocks piled around that we could look at. Frustrated, we headed to the second place on the list, which was over in West Jordan. We looked over their rocks, and found something that I thought would work, but Ann wasn't convinced. She wanted the same rocks as before. So we left there and headed to the last one on our list, over in Murray.
You know it's kind of frustrating when people don't update their websites. This place was listed as being at 141 W. Vine Street. It's Staker-Parsons, which is a pretty big name in sand and gravel/ landscaping etc. What was at that approximate address was the parking lot for the Murray Trax station, light rail parking, that had been in that location for at least ten years. Why not update your freaking website?
We decided to go back to the house, eat some lunch, do more research on the rocks. I found only one other name, and when I checked it out, it led back to the one that was in a residential area. This time I called on the phone, then texted, to see if I could figure out where this rock place actually was. I was tired and had a headache after all of this, so I decided to lie down and take a nap. I had just fallen deeply into sleep when the phone rang. It was the guy at the rock place. He said that he ran the business out of his house, but that the landscaping rocks were in various areas around the house so I could go and look in his yard to see if I liked any of them. Ann and I decided that we could do that on the way to Tremonton, so once again, we headed to Magna.
After a little searching, we finally found the street, Moon Beam Bay Drive, and the house. We found that they had the kind of rocks we wanted. I called to place an order with the guy, but got his voice mail. I left a message and then we headed up to Tremonton.
We had gotten to such a late start that we were now in rush hour traffic, headed north toward Ogden and beyond. It took us a while, but we finally got to Tremonton, and the drive-in called Mack's that I had been anxious to go back to.
The food wasn't bad, but when we ordered the ice cream afterward, we were disappointed. I ordered a hot fudge shake and Ann had an ice cream cone. The shake wasn't mixed well, and it wasn't hot fudge that the girl mixed in--some kind of chocolate, but not hot fudge. Definitely not as good as last year when we stopped there on the way back from Salmon, Idaho.
Our dinner done, we began the drive back home. The sun was getting low and I was trying to make it to a place that I knew of that is kind of an overlook of the Great Salt Lake. But the sun was setting faster than we were getting there. Ann asked me to get off the freeway and take a picture, but the freeway was about thirty feet higher than the surrounding terrain and I didn't think I could find a high enough spot in those lowlands to get a shot of the sky. I kept trying to get the the overlook, but the sun was going down. I finally pulled off and began looking for a place to take a picture. There was a railroad overpass (no parking on top of course), and we drove down the western side of it and I tried to hurry back up to the top to get a shot, but the moment was gone. "I told you you should have gotten off the freeway earlier," Ann said.
She was right. The guy never called back a second time, and I've texted and called him today with no response. I hope he's just busy and will soon call me back, because he had quite a few good reviews on ksl.com. All in all yesterday was a weird and unproductive day, I didn't hate it, but it wasn't one to write down in the memory books. Good thing there are other days.
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