stormdog | (no subject) (Reply)

I forgot to write about all the fun that Posi and I had on Sunday! We were going to get together for car hunting, but since Andrea and I had already solved that problem on Saturday, we had the day free to do random things. And do them we did!

We took a trip to Gurnee Mills to stop in at a few places like Micomp. They didn't have the adapter I needed but I did have fun looking at the smattering of rack mount servers. I was also chastised by a clerk for removing one of the drives from one of the aforementioned servers. Since I couldn't look at the labeling, I asked the clerk what the rotation speed and interface on the drive was, and was impressed by the fact that he had ready answers!

I had a vague notion about visiting Black Market Minerals, but since it was on the other end of the mall, we gave it a miss and proceeded on to our next destination, which we decided on during the drive; the Gurnee business park nearby. I suggested a round of dumpster diving and Posi seemed to think it was a great idea. Not only will he do storm drains with me, but he'll go technology scavenging with me too! I think I need to keep him around. *grins*

Unfortunately, the most interesting thing we found was a large brake drum that I thought about grabbing for later conversion into the firepit of a forge, but there was some kind of stuff all over it, and it was sitting in the middle of a bunch of empty bags of urea. Not being immediately conversant with the properties of that material (except for a memory from somewhere or other that it was the first organic chemical ever successfully synthesized), I decided that discretion would be the better part of valor in this case. The very promisingly named 'Inacomp Computer Systems' and a couple other possibilities with similarly meaningless technical sounding names yielded no new toys. We also noted that there were oddly few dumpsters in this particular business park. Some buildings don't seem to be producing waste, as they didn't seem to have any at all!

From there we moved on to Big Lots, a Sears Hardware that was going out of business (I wish I'd had more money to spend on discounted tools!), and a Wal-Mart to check out the clearance section. Posi said he doesn't feel bad buying items from Wal-Mart on clearance because that means they're losing money, and I suppose there's a point to be made there. I still won't buy anything from them though. I even passed up a very reasonably priced set of very pretty black anodized aluminum wind chimes. I've always wanted a pretty set like that, but I decided that if I'm going to buy one, it will be from the artisan at Bristol faire who makes them himself. Even when I was a little boy I remember being fascinated by the eight foot bass chimes outside his store. They're a wonderful part of my childhood memories from faire, and that's where my set is going to come from. Next year I'll be able to do that.

Next stop was the Golden Corral for dinner. I suppose I really need to break myself of my buffet habit, but they're so good! I'll admit it; I'm not exactly a gourmand. As long as the quality isn't sub-basement level, I'll take the quantity of a buffet over the quality of a fancy steakhouse or the like. I'll more than happily grab a slice of pizza from one section, pour nacho cheese sauce from another section over it, and then top it off with one scoop of macaroni and cheese and one scoop of noodles in meat sauce from a third, then mix it all together. Yum!

Mmm, now I'm getting hungry. I hope Andrea has something good planned for dinner. She made some tortellini in red sauce last night that