One Tony Jimenez points to another reason the headlights in Canada were out more often (besides being on more often). To wit:

Cold weather causes the lights to go out more often, which would explain why you saw it all the time in Canada, but very few times in Texas. My wife was from Minnesota so there were many there. My guess is that the constant freezing and thawing makes causes the vacuum seal for the light bulb to fail more often, thus requiring a local law forcing people to get them fixed.

Works for me.

This evening was full, lemmie tell ya. We loaded down my Wife’s credit card with crap from Lowe’s, then we discovered the two large plastic lawn chairs were in fact too large to fit in my car. After a few failed attempts to flag down friends with trucks, we just tied the trunk down as best we could (as it turns out, Lowe’s gives you free string to tie your trunk down with, along with those red plastic flags). This killed most of the evening.

Because my wife had things to do I volunteered to go to the grocery store for us, as well as picking up this evening’s dinner. I wanted to hurry up and finish the shopping since I was hungry and I wanted to get some coding in before the night was shot. I got nine of the ten things on the list with no problem, then I hit the problem point: Velveeta. Crap. Without going too deep into Seinfeld mode, I have a mental block against Velveeta. That is, I can never remember where it is in the store, no matter how many times I get it. Plus, the stores tend to move it around. Once, at a different store my wife and I finally found some, and the clerk actually complimented our ability to find it, which she told us was rare for that store.

The key problem with Velveeta is that it’s not a defined food. It’s not in the cheese section (usually), since it doesn’t have to be refrigerated. However, there’s not a really logical section for “unrefrigerated cheese”, so it’s a crapshoot where the Velveeta is. I was happy since right off the bat I spotted small boxes with “Velveeta” on them. But when I got there they were Velveeta Shells and Cheese dinner. Shit. I even walked past a large can (tub is more like it) of Nacho Cheese, the kind they spread thin at band booster concession stands. Cheese? Hello? No Velveeta to be seen.

Supermarkets are laid out in such a way that you can usually narrow it down to where your food isn’t. At some point in the store, the items stop being food and tend to be things like mops and detergent, until you hit the wall where the frozen stuff is. Then on the other end of the store tend to be things like produce and the deli/florist/pharmacy. So I had the Velveeta narrowed down to a subset of rows, but I went up and down these rows repeatedly. Add to this the fact that I’m getting more hungry, tired and flustered and the situation started to really suck.

Finally I found it. In the snack section. The snack section. Who in the hell is eating Velveeta as a snack? I mean, I’m making a snack out of it, but the Velveeta itself is not a snack. Good grief.

After getting home, eating and assembling a VCR thingy (more later) I was too frayed to get any coding in. Oh well, there’s always tommorow.