Weekend Roundup – Monday Edition

Whew, what a weekend!

Neither H or I found ourselves doing anything grand but it all left me tired enough to fall asleep on the couch yesterday afternoon by 5 p.m..

On Saturday we woke up and headed to Lake Elsinore, CA. Now before we go any further I would like to state for the record that this place has nothing to do with Elsinore Brewery from the classic Bob and Doug McKenzie movie Strange Brew. As a matter of fact it had everything to do with Pottery Barn.

We learned a while back that Pottery Barn has an outlet store in the mall in Lake Elsinore so we decided to wake up and head down to check things out.

First let’s talk about the weather. Off the top of my head I’d say we traveled around 70 miles south and east to arrive at the mall. Somehow during that time the temperature went from a comfortable 75 degrees to 101 when we opened the door in the parking lot. I mean we only drove a little more than an hour, it’s not as if we made our way to Mexico or anything. I don’t do well in the heat to begin with so I found myself ducking under the store awnings for shade every chance I could.

The mall itself was a disappointment. We had very little interest in many of the stores, and the ones we did pop into were charging regular price. Hey Old Navy, I know your prices are super low to begin with but how about a little break on some underwear if I am buying it from the outlet? The one store with great deals however was Pottery Barn. It was a massive store and everything was discounted from 20%, 40% and up to 60%. You name it and it was there – tables, chairs, rugs, accessories, mirrors, pretty much anything you would see in a regular store or catalog. Apparently they receive a number of shipments per week and they never know what they are receiving, which is disappointing for us because if we lived closed I think we could get a bargain every once in a while. So what did our trip yield us? A t-shirt from GAP for H and a wicker basket from Pottery Barn to hold Carter’s toys.

After lunch at Chilli’s, which is disappointing but what did we expect, we battled typically terrible California traffic back into the city.

Sunday morning H and I made our way to Torrence to visit Sam’s Club. She needed a few things for work and our place required some laundry detergent, fabric softener and soda. From there we made our way to Target and picked up a few more things before landing at H’s office to dump off eight cases of soda and candy. Don’t ask.

Before heading out today I removed the air filter from the HVAC unit in our condo, noted the size and threw out the old one. Back in Chicago we were always diligent about replacing the filters but so far we haven’t kept up with the kind of schedule we should in terms of swapping them out. We needed one that was 18×20x1. Before we made our way into Sam’s we checked out Home Depot where we always bought our filters in the past. None in our size. We checked Target later in the day. Nothing. Came home and H called Home Depot near us and got hung up on. Tried Lowes but after being transfered five times they didn’t have one either. Called Sears but after being on hold for 15 minutes I decided nobody was going to help me out. Hopped on the interweb and began calling hardware stores in the area. Half of them were closed, another quarter didn’t carry our size and the other twenty-five percent didn’t speak English when they picked up (no joke). I finally found a True Value that had our size! Why is ours so difficult? I tell the guy I am on the way down and he says they close at 3 p.m.. It’s 2:45 when I hang up. Run downstairs to the car, make my way to somewhere in Hollywood and come back with two filters – we were then able to turn the AC on and get the temperature down from the 79 degrees it had become in our place.

I had every intention of cleaning the condo today but it never happened. After doing some work I could barely keep my eyes open and fell asleep on the couch. Carter was sick, throwing up twice. Part of it has to do with the heat in our place today when we didn’t have the air on, and I’m sure the cheese a certain parent (not me) fed him yesterday didn’t sit well with his stomach.