Tonight was an evening that reminded me of why I moved. I stopped off in Palo Alto to drop off my *sigh* broken glasses. (I swear, that office has a curse on it. These are the glasses that it took them three tries to get right. So now I'm back to the scratched old glasses that I tried to replace back in October. Feh. But that's neither here nor there.) My mother's office is literally just around the corner from the optomestrist's, so I decided to drop in and say hi. She's been down a lot recently, so I thought I might try and cheer her up.

We ended up grabbing my father and going to dinner. Yay for random family times. When I was up in SF it was a rare month that I saw my folks more than once.

On the way to dinner we passed Fry's, and I remembered that I wanted to get a new backpack, since the one I picked up previously doesn't fit my laptop. So after dinner I stuck my nose in.

Yay for randomly being able to drop by Fry's. When I was in SF I had to wait until the weekend to trek the hour down to the closest one. And usually then I had to plan the entire day around the trek, rather than just randomly popping in for a bit.

Fry's didn't provide any truely stunning answers to my backpack dillemna. They did taunt me by having several copies of GT4 in. Unfortunately, I already have it on order at another place, and I like the other place enough that I would prefer to give them my business. Though if they don't get it in tomorrow, I will be seriously tempted to give up and turn to the Fry's side. (So, uh, rhylar, would you like to have your very own copy of GT4? Heh, heh, heh...)

Fry's had several screens hooked up to consoles and steering wheels. So I gave in to curiosity and gave one of the rally tracks a spin. I purposely choose a track that I'm familiar with from GT3, just so I would have a reasonable basis for comparison. The feel of the steering wheel was... well, rather like chopping wood. Very frustrating. After the tenth spin I was getting miffed when I heard a voice say "I didn't know they let kids in here." I recognized the voice as belonging to weregamer.

Yay for randomly running into friends in Fry's. I would do that sometime back when I lived in SF. But never when I randomly went to Fry's, since, well, I never randomly went to Fry's before.

After chatting for a bit weregamer wandered off to find what he was looking for and I, alas, ended up in front of the steering wheel again. It occured to me that I was on a dirt track. Who needs a steering wheel, I've got a brake pedal and an accelerator.

Let me just say that left-foot braking while standing up is a bit awkward. But it did allow me to steer better than I did when I was trying to use the steering wheel.

I'm glad that I'm really tired, so I'm not taunted too much by Fry's. After all, there is still Katamari Damacy to play. Though left-foot braking in that doesn't work so well.