So I'm going to Costco for lunch, figuring I can cross a couple things off my El Paso todo list. When I went to charge my camera batteries last night, I found they won't hold a charge. The camera takes 4 of them too, which is no good. It's not the latest and greatest sample of digital photographic equipment, that's for sure. Costco.com shows a 4-pack of NiMH batteries with a 15-minute charger for $25 - it sounded good, and I know I had seen it in the store before. So after my hot dog, I go battery hunting. And I can't find them. For 15 minutes. I know I've seen them there before, and now I can't find any batteries at all. I even had to go so far as to ask someone where they were, which I absolutely hate doing. So, where were they? Right up front, as you walk in the door. About six pallets of them. >:-O They didn't have exactly what I was looking for, but it was close - a 6-pack of NiMH AA's for $13, but no charger. Fine, I'll use the charger I have at home. Hopefully the batteries were the problem, not the charger!
While I'm there, I check out the various language learning programs on audio cd, thinking it would be a good way to pass the time both driving there and back, plus an actual activity would probably do a better job of keeping me awake. At $19, the price was right as well. Eight cd's per language, and at 75 minutes per cd, that's about 10 hours of content. Perfect! Unfortunately, I wasn't really interested in the languages they had at the moment - Spanish, French, and Japanese. Obviously Spanish could have been sorta useful, given where I'm going, but I wasn't interested for whatever reason. French, no thanks. They don't even pronounce half the letters in each word it seems. Those letters can't just sit there and be ignored, they demand to be heard. Japenese could have been cool, but every account I've heard says that it's a really tough language to learn, and I wasn't up for that sort of challenge. I know in the past they've had German and Italian as well. I was kind of hoping they'd have German there. Despite taking 4 years of it in high school, I don't really know much. Perhaps a different leaning technique would lend itself to better results? Who knows. For $19, it would have been worth it to find out I think. Maybe some other time.
So let's review the todo list: