Weekend Saga

This weekend was supposed to be something novel: The first weekend in a long time in which Todd and I were not going to have to unpack boxes, procure furniture, or put together furniture. We were actually going to have a chance to have fun in our new digs. Yeah, we had a few chores, like getting to the laundromat, hitting the grocery store, and buying me a winter coat at Burlington Coat Factory. But compared to the Ikea treks of weekends past, this was nothing.

Ha! On Saturday, we ended up going to 4 grocery stores. Four! First we went to Roche Bros., which we'd never been to before. And we could see why: They had Whole Foods prices, but not Whole Foods fabulousness. After putting a few things in our cart, we realized that it was ridiculous, abandoned the cart in the store, and left in a huff. Next, we went to the actual Whole Foods, so I could get tofu. This appears to be the only grocery store chain in the entire state (at least in my limited experience so far) where I can find blocks of baked, seasoned tofu, of the kind I could find in every damn place in the Bay Area. C'mon Boston! Get with the program. Maybe Boston actually is with the program, and I'm just experiencing the joy of the 'burbs. I don't know.

Because Whole Foods is so expensive, tofu is about all I can afford to buy there. Which is sad. But given that produce is already generally expensive here (the short growing season and all), and we eat lots of it, we are spending more for groceries than we ever have. Luckily, next door to Whole Foods is Trader Joe's, which, in California, was the light of my life. It was cheap, it was good, and it had tofu. It didn't let me down. Unfortunately, the Trader Joe's near us is disappointing. A tiny produce section. No baked tofu, as I mentioned before. And the prices in general seem higher than the TJ's I went to in Emeryville. Well, except for the wine, which is still cheap. And this is one of the few TJ's in the state with license to sell wine, so I guess we lucked out there.

This week, TJ's produce section appeared to be especially skimpy, so we couldn't get everything we needed. Which meant we had to swing by Stop and Shop on our way home. Stop and Shop, we've found, is so far the least disappointing of all the stores near us, and has the best prices, so we were able to find the last few items we wanted. We then trudged dejectedly home.

In the middle of all of this -- I think in between Roche Bros. and Whole Foods -- we went to the Burlington Coat Factory, where I actually bought a few clothes that might keep me warm this winter, along with a winter coat. This was not an easy task, because they have a gazillion coats, and I don't know what the hell to get. It's hard for a coat virgin like me to tell what is going to be warm enough and what will be too warm. After much debate, it came down to 2 coats: a lovely gray wool knee-length number, and a mid-calf down extravaganza that had me sweating in the store. I could probably live outside in Alaska in the down coat, so I thought it might be a bit much. I went with the wool, but still wonder if the other one might have been better. I don't know! I need a personal fashion advisor! I tried to make Todd into this person, but it didn't work so well. As I was trying on the coats, and going back and forth between the 2 chosen ones, Todd was sitting on the floor of the store, looking like he might fall asleep. I should have let him lay on one of the coats.

All of this meant that we didn't get to laundry on Saturday, which we had wanted to do so we could spend the entire day in Boston (having fun!) on Sunday. We decided we would just get up early and wash our clothes, so we could then head into the city.

So we got up on Sunday, and Todd turned on the computer. Or, rather, he tried to. It was dead. Dead, dead, dead. We're not sure what happened. It never even said goodbye. But it did take my iTunes playlist, and several of Todd's files for work, with it. Being Columbus Day weekend, there was a sale at CompUSA. Todd promptly ran out and bought a replacement machine on Sunday morning. We then spent all of the morning and the majority of the afternoon not in Boston, but huddled in our office, setting up the new computer. And trying to figure out how to get my music from my iPod back into iTunes, which can't be done without some kind of software that we need to download. We tried several different programs, and nothing seemed to work. Really, this shouldn't be so hard. Apple just wants people to suffer. I was so frustrated. And also pissed off at myself for not somehow foreseeing this and burning a CD or 2 of my iTunes playlist.

We finally headed into Boston around 3 or 4, tooled around the North End and had dinner. As we were heading back to the T, we decided to go to a slightly farther stop and walk along some of the Freedom Trail. As we did, we came across the Holocaust Memorial, which we had been wanting to visit. It consists of glass columns in a row; they are hollow in the middle and you walk through them in a straight line. Etched on the glass, reaching up to the sky, are numbers like those that were assigned to people in the deathcamps. There are so many of them, they completely cover the glass. Also etched on the glass, on the inside, where you walk, are quotes from people who survived, and others, about the experience of the Holocaust. As you walk through the columns, warm steam rises through grates in the ground. Underneath the grates are flickering lights. The crematorium. I couldn't help but cry.

Being there was unbelievably intense and moving. And it put into perspective all my frustration about my iPod and the computer crash. I mean really, who even cares? And going to 4 grocery stores? How privileged I am that I have 4 that I can go to. My worries are so mundane. It's so easy to get wrapped up in these everyday stresses that I can forget that there are more important (and worse) things that have happened, and that continue to happen. In the midst of my weekend saga, it was good to have a reality check.