why the brick and mortar be crumbling

i know this is gonna drive the ufc crazy…

…but we gemini folks tackle house projects differently. “scattered” in the eyes of most people. but we are the original multi-taskers. just don’t expect hard and fast deadlines ’cause that probably won’t happen. it’ll all get done…eventually. and in an as-yet-to-be-determined order. but it’ll get done.

part of what we’re trying to do at the house, the second of the “big” projects, is the sewer. it’s not east getting plumbers out these days because a lot were booked out a while with all the damage from Sno-Vid21 but that all seems to be waning so i’m not sure what all the delay is lately, but it’s certainly present. in the interim we have a drain on the side of the house that seems to just be getting worse so i opted to try to fix it the way i did out bathroom one but that required some new parts for my drain auger.

i got the thing from my buddy’s pawn shop for about a fourth of retail and it’s really pretty good, except it got kinked to shit at one point and needed to have the wire replaced, which is around a fifty dollar part. once a week i take mr. grey out for a jog to keep his fluids circulating and percolating so i took him out the other day to the bustling texas metropolis of niederwald, texas (pop 576 according to google, which is about double what i expected) and stopped there to look at the home depot app. the plan was, if it showed what i needed in stock we proceed to the home depot in kyle (ten minutes on the other side of da’ ‘wald) or make the loop up hwy 21 and back to the house, completing a roughly twenty mile ride.

the app showed in stock, so i went to kyle.

upon arrival and following the app’s directions to what aisle and bin i needed to visit not only was it not there but there wasn’t even a shelf marker for it. when i finally got somebody over there (that took a while) they looked, didn’t see it, pulled out their phone to use the employee inventory app, and showed me how it showed “ZERO”. i showed how the consumer one said “Low Stock” which he said was that app’s speak for “ZERO”. when i pointed out that it would make more sense for the app to say “SOLD OUT” in that situation he just shrugged. when i mentioned that i’d just driven from another county based on the app’s erroneous information i simply got, “wow – that sucks”.

yeah, it does…and this is why brick and mortar stores are going away in place of online retailing. in the old days if we went somewhere we had no way of knowing if shit was there till we arrived. and if it wasn’t, we waited. why? because we didn’t know any better. it’s kinda like porn in the dial up days – it took so long for a single image to load we’d probably finish before it got all the way. that’s what started the whole foot fetish thing – if you could last till you saw her feet you felt like you won something!

but i digress…

…things got a bit more annoying when i went to actually leave kyle and the exit i needed was being worked on, which forced me to the next one which was close enough to san marcos i just went three more miles and exited in fucking san marcos. i had some car was certificates i hadn’t used so grey got a nice bath and while i waited, just for shits and giggles, and between leaving unanswered voicemails for plumbers, i checked the lowe’s app and it showed they had two. i went to the lowe’s in san marcos and to my surprise they actually had TWO, and discounted down to get close to the home depot price. all done, so now i get to snake my own sewer in a couple spots…

…wait – why was this a good thing?