target Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Star Trek Fashions

I am getting a far later start this morning in blogging. I warned my twitter followers that my morning post would end up being an afternoon post, but since this gets syndicated on all the platforms… apologies to the rest of you who were expecting a post early. Why did it get delayed you might ask? Well we had to get up and around and get some last minute things done. Thankfully the activities gave me what I refer to as “blog fodder”. Be warned I am not exactly going on chronological order here, but bear with me.

Firstly… I know that geeks are sexy, or at least that is what the media keeps telling me. That said… when did it become cool for women to look like Star Trek: The Next Generation? I realize that the recent movies were blockbusters of serious magnitude. I did now however expect Star Trek fashion to trickle out into the mainstream. The above shirts are from Cato, one of the places we stopped this morning looking for various sundry items. Actually we went there to buy an item they no longer have… but that isn’t really important. What is important is I cannot get the image of a Star Trek uniform out of my head when looking at these shirts.

To the right is a similar dress that I found earlier in the season at Target. If you follow me on twitter or G+ I am sure you saw me post it. If not here it is in all of its TNG glory. If Data were female she would totally be sporting this dress. Then again the more I think about it… none of the women on TNG wore dresses at all, but instead got the unisex jumpsuits everyone else wore. I guess you would have to go back to the classic series or the reboot movies to find dresses at all. The trend however may not be entirely limited to Star Trek. I cannot see the t-shirt on the right without thinking Boba Fett.

Granted these could just be hallucinations as I have spent more time of late in clothing stores than I would ever care to. My wife has been on this mission to look “more put together”, and she has gone through a similar physical transition as I have losing almost 50 lbs. I completely support whatever goals she happens to have, but I find myself extremely bored most of the time and when I get bored my mind wanders. As a result I am probably just trying to make these things into something more palatable. I have been having to draw on my art school background in helping her pick out things that “go together” without strictly matching. I keep having to remind my wife that the experience is not nearly as exciting for me as it is for her.

AARP: Loved by Children Everywhere

Another jaunt of this morning while we were out and about was to go by and get our hair cut. For me it had been extremely long and I was looking rather scruffy. To be truthful I cannot tell you exactly when I last got it cut. We went to our normal place and signed up on the list, waiting for a friend of ours to get free. Personally it is worth the wait for Mandy, who is extremely popular… in part because I can simply say “make me look presentable” and that means something to her. She translates well, and I find the ability invaluable… and since I tend to go extremely late I always feel like I need to leave her an extremely good tip.

While waiting there, I got to watch an entire family getting their hair cut. The parents didn’t really look old enough to have three kids, but honestly that was the least of my worries. You would think if one parent was getting their hair cut, the other one would be in the waiting room corralling the kids. This however was not on their radar at all. They sat back talking to the beautician and bellowing command rather ineffectually at their offspring that were roaming around the waiting room and generally running amok.

I don’t remember exactly which of the kids began this, but they found their way to the basket of magazines sitting beside my wife and I. Each of them picked out a magazine carefully, and when it came time for the youngest girl she took extra care. She rifled through the basket tossing aside several magazines before arriving at her prize. When she took up she held lovingly clasped in her hands a copy of AARP Magazine. The look of beaming pride on her face only made the scene all that more hilarious. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

The magazines however didn’t hold their attention long. It was only a matter of minutes until they were back running around the waiting room in a big circle. I am not sure what exactly happened but next time I looked up the littlest one was sitting in the floor crying. I am guessing that she could not keep up with the rough housing and got knocked down. It was only when there were tears flowing that the absentee parents finally paid enough attention to bark additional orders at their kinder. I realize I am a non-parent, and I am that way by choice… but I would like to think that if I did have kids I would actually pay some manner of attention to them.

Home At Last

I am finally back home and wrapped back up in my cocoon. Since the weight loss I have been inordinately colder natured, and as a result I now have a fuzzy blanket wrapped around my backside and another fuzzy blanket laid over top of me. It makes it a pain in the ass to get up off the couch but man is it nice and toasty warm. This of course is along with my flanel pants. and thermal henley… I am maybe overdressed for the fact that we do have heat. I am not sure what is on the radar today. I have various sundry betas that I could be playing, or I could just hop into World of Warcraft once the servers come back up. I am assuming they did maintenance today, however since it is Christmas Eve I am not sure if that would be the case.

Speaking of Christmas… I will be posting tomorrow like normal, but if you are too busy with your own family to read my blog… I want to take the time right now to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. Most of the time I feel like I am talking to myself here, but I am constantly surprised at just how many loyal readers I have. You all mean the world to me, and while I would probably keep blogging even if I had no audience at all… you make me feel far less crazy in this endeavor. I hope you all have a great holiday tomorrow, and that you are blanketed by loved ones. We will be travelling a bit, but will not be terribly far from home. Here is hoping the next few days are joyous… or at the very least tolerable.

Plans are a Crutch

I had these plans yesterday of running the last part of Siege of Orgrimmar, but didn’t actually do that at all. I queued for it at one point, but after seeing it would take an hour I bailed and gave up. After being iced in for several days, we were out of a few things… not the least of which was toilet paper and paper towels. The above picture is to show the extent of the icing… for years I have gotten in the habit of raising my wiper blades so they don’t get frozen to the window. As you can see it is like everything had been sealed in plastic to preserve it for eternity. If nothing else I knew I had to clear the vehicles so we could leave if we absolutely needed to.

It actually did not take as long as I expected. I went outside in my pajamas and started my jeep, then went back inside to take a shower and get ready for the morning. When I got back out the heater inside and engine had managed to warm the ice up enough to where I could start breaking it off rather easily. Roughly 20 minutes later I had cleared my Jeep and was headed back inside to let my wife’s vehicle warm up. I could barely feel my fingers… but it was at least clear. When I cleared my wife’s vehicle I had the foresight to actually wear gloves.

We made it out of the house pretty easily, and I have to say this is the weirdest ice storm I have ever experienced. Everything is absolutely coated in a layer of ice… the trees, the vehicles, the grass, anything elevated even slightly off the ground. However the roads are almost completely dry. It is like the perfect ice storm… all of the pretty with none of the consequences. Granted some parts of the city are out of power as the ice snapped powerlines… so they would definitely question my assessment of no consequences. All in all however it could be been and likely should have been much worse.

I Hate People

I mean this in the nicest possible way… but I hate people. When you put me in a room with more than a half a dozen people a severe fight or flight instinct triggers. Now imagine how that instinct multiplies when you put me in a busy store during the holidays filled with hundreds of people. I am generally pretty good at swallowing down that feeling, but the more stores you expose me to… the more of an asshole I become. I am thankful that my wife realizes this because by the time we reached the last two stores of the day I am sure I was an absolute bear to be around. We had several things still to pick up on our list, so while we were out and about… and since we were both going a little stir crazy we decided to try and knock as many things off the list as possible.

Target was both the worst and the best place we went all afternoon. It was the worst because it was inanely busy and as I rounded the corner near the seasonal area… the instinct kicked in harder than it has in years. There was this huge zombie-like shambling mass of people migrating back and forth between toys and electronics. I gave up on any notion that I was going to go check the Lego isle and got out of there as soon as possible. It became a logistical exercise to even navigate my shopping cart through the narrow passages left by gawking customers. I suddenly realized why a lost child just sits down and cries… because at that point I seriously did feel like surrendering to the hopelessness that was all of those people pressing in on me.

That was the worst part… the best part however is just how efficiently they were managing the checkouts. They had roped off the area in front of the cash registers and while this caused the line to snake all the way down to the pharmacy area, it did make it move faster. They had a worker acting like a traffic cop to funnel people down the little shoots and to the next waiting cashier. Additionally they gave us a 10% discount as an apology for the whole credit card fiasco. Since we were actually hit during that event… I felt like we had more than earned it. Last weekend my discover card was off in Oklahoma City and Norman making purchases without me… and we are assuming since we still have our credit cards… it is tied to the whole Target event.

I probably would have gone postal at some point during yesterday, but we went to eat at Monterry, a Mexican chain restaurant we go to regularly. When I say regularly… I mean it, because the waitresses know our order by heart and often times fight over who is going to wait on us. Yesterday we had Daisy, who is extremely awesome and has the same pen fetish that my wife does. Over the time we have been going there, we have become rather social with them… and eating there act like a reset of my buffer. It was a happy place that helped me cope with the madness that was stores like Old Navy. Still by the time we ended our tour at Big Lots, I was so far past going that I am sure I was acting like an ass.

Relaxing with Friends

Yesterday before the madness began, I noticed that my good friend Vernie had managed to hit 90 on his mage. I did my normal song and dance about how awesome the Timeless Isle was for catching up, but as a very squishy class it seemed that soloing out there was just not something viable. We made tentative plans for me to grab one of my characters and help him get some gear after I got back from the holiday craziness. It was shortly after I got home that he logged back in and we did just that. At first I tried to use Exeter my paladin, but I quickly realized that I already had gotten the weekly chests when I swam him out to get the chest in the pirate cave. I grabbed Belgarou my druid, because I knew I had not really played him in a few weeks.

It turns out that this was a great call as I ran out of leather some time ago and could greatly use a run to replenish it. We faffed about the island for several hours and in the process we managed to get him Helm, Chest, Bracers, Belt, Gloves, Back, Legs, Ring and Trinket. Which in itself was a pretty amazing haul for our first outing. He had not really played since Cataclysm, so there are a ton of systems that simply did not exist back then. The big one is the LFR system, so as we hunted for gear on the island we queued for Mogushan Vaults. The queue was surprisingly short and we managed to make it through the three boss raid in extremely quick time.

I guess the game did not want him to have an unrealistic view of how the LFR system worked, because when we queued up for the second part of the raid… it went horribly. Someone pulled the boss too quickly, the tanks had no clue what they were doing… and we wiped. Moments after the wipe the raid just disintegrated in a matter of seconds. I told him that sadly that was also extremely common. While we waited for that raid to officially die we went out to Dinosaur Island… or more properly Isle of Giants. We had zero luck in both pets and eggs, but we killed quite a few and I got some more leather. I am not sure if it was in the first raid or the second… but at some point Vernie managed to pick up shoulders.

During the course of our faffing about he managed to go from 450 something to 474 and if we can get him a few more upgrades he should be able to start doing Throne of Thunder…. which I think is one of the more enjoyable instances of the expansion. After we finished the second raid, that went surprisingly successfully. Elegon managed to eat a half dozen people to the “floor boss”, but all in all we pulled out a win. Will of the Emperor was a wipe at first, namely because the tanks didn’t really know what they were doing. However someone luckily explained to them and we managed to pull that victory out as well. All in all it was a really fun night, and I was happy that we got Vernie a ton of upgrades in the process. Once again Faffing about pays off.