The tax holiday is definitely flypaper for the scary locals. We hit Lowe's (the good independent hardware store in town is closed on weekends, so Lowe's the is the lesser of two evils) for more gas for the torch, another piece of pig iron for our pseudo-anvil, and a shaping hammer and it wasn't any worse than a regular weekend. (I'll post more about what Himself is doing with all of it later.) Then we made the mistake of going to Staples to see if they had a toner cartridge for my laser printer and it actually took us ten minutes to get the 50 feet from the door to their toner display. Most of the problem is that the people shopping today are incapable of looking up and/or reading the aisle-end signs that I always thought were pretty explicit about what any given aisle has. Meh.

On the way home, we ordered a drink from Sonic with cherry in it and actually got cherry instead of watermelon. Very happy about that. Their new peach cream slush is pretty good too -- real bits of fruit in it and it's actually blended. (Our local store seems to have quit blending cream slushes a few months ago.)

Two funny things happened on the way home:

Funny ha-ha: While waiting at a stoplight, a pair of mating dragonflies flew in front of our idling car. They were moving too fast for me to get a picture, but my initial reaction was "hey, humping dragonflies!". Himself responded, "They're mating. Haven't you seen that before?"

Funny scary: About two blocks short of where Berkeley/US 13 merges down to two lanes from four with a center turning lane, a tractor-trailer passed us on the right. Out of my usual attention to detail, I noted the truck was from someplace called MDV Nash Finch, then we cracked ricer jokes since there were large Hyundai logos on both the trailer and its mudflaps. I don't like being passed on the right, so I did my best to ignore it until I noticed the driver finally realized the road narrows to two lanes and decided to merge left at the last stoplight (New Hope Rd) before the change. The truck narrowly missed taking out the supersized SUV in front of us, which bothered me. After getting home, I looked up the company name and found out they're a big East Coast distributor to military exchanges and commissaries, so the truck must have just barreled along in the right line straight from whenever it got on Berkeley (tractor-trailers can't use the main gate) to there without noticing the road markings indicating the road narrows after the New Hope light.