Today at GenCon I bought colored contacts. Black actually. Never having worn contacts before ever in my life, it took me 45 minutes to get them in. A nice lady gave me a bottle of solution to keep, and passed along some tips for putting them in. Fortunately the hotel sundries shop had a $2 contact lens case for me to keep them in!

I have been wearing them for about six hours now and they feel fine. They give me a tiny smidge of tunnel vision but it’s not bad - I am pretty amazed that I can see out of them perfectly normally! (Remember, before today I had never even held a contact lens, let alone worn one.) Once I take them out tonight, I may not put them back in for a while -
probably not till after I get home from the honors retreat and stuff. I definitely want to come home to A with them on! Then again, maybe I will practice putting them in a few more times.

I have wanted colored contacts for SO long. I was amazed that these were only $45! I was kind of torn between the black and the red, but I decided the black would be more subtle. I want people to peer at my eyes wondering “hey, is something weird with your eyes?” rather than just saying “whoa, you’ve got red eyes!” I got them from ExoticLenses.com; they had a lot of different styles but the black and red (and maybe white) were the only ones I was really interested in.

Update: I took them out after about eight hours of wear. They looked really cool, and only took a couple of minutes to take out versus 45 minutes to put in! I finally signed up for the $10/day internet, so when I am not so tired I will type up the past couple of days worth of happenings.

We were supposed to go to a Buffy singalong tonight, but my brilliant sister-in-law didn’t go to buy the tickets until Thursday night, and of course they were sold out. So we’re going to see the Harry Potter movie instead. I also finally redesigned my Sidekick 3 skin; the first one came out really bad and satisfaction is guaranteed so I wrote to them, mailed back the bad one, and got a coupon for a free replacement. The front is going to look like this now.

Also, we went to the Original Pancake House today and had yummy pancakes - I got Chocolate Chip and A got buckwheat with pecans. I had never been to the Falls Church location; tikva and I went to the Rockville one a couple of times. I took some Alli before the pancakes; I’m giving it a try. A’s been using it for a little while but I am not sure if I will want to do it forever.

I interpreted Capital Pride 2007 today with some very talented co-interpreters. Now I am tired. There are some website things I need to work on but I will do that stuff tomorrow. It was fun, I got this great shirt (a parody of this one), I saw cool people. I love Pride.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’m starting a swimming class! This actually began when I found a very pretty swimsuit, and I wanted an excuse to buy it and wear it. I looked into water aerobics classes at my local recreation center, but they were over $200 so I figured I would just do my own laps to get some exercise. I really do need to exercise, but I don’t like using the elliptical machine or the exercise bike we already have, because both are hard on my knees. (I have symptoms of arthritis in most of my joints, but my knees are especially bad.) So I figured that swimming would be a very good no-impact workout.

My wife convinced me that $80 was too much to pay for a swimsuit, and the swimsuit I ended up getting was just $15! I got this style, but the accent color is magenta rather than orange. Then I was checking out the website for my local rec center, and I thought I’d look again at the class offerings. It turned out they have a four-week “Lap Swimming” class for $75, so I signed up for that immediately. They will teach us how to create a proper workout, how to use the pace clock, and probably things like turns and etiquette too. The first class is tonight and I am really looking forward to it - even if we don’t do a whole lot of swimming, it will be a good start.

I was quite surprised to get an e-mail this morning saying that my flowers were being delivered today. I promptly called the company and asked; it turns out that when we called to cancel yesterday it was too late to really cancel the order, so they had to let that one go ahead and they’re sending another shipment on Saturday. Fortunately they’re not going to charge me a second time!

I don’t usually order flowers because they’re so expensive - sometimes I’ll bring home a cheap bouquet from the grocery store - but Valentine’s Day is an appropriate occasion, and I wanted something pretty in the hotel room while we were there. But I didn’t expect to send roses to the hotel staff! If I’m not going to have to pay for it, though, why not pretty up their workplace too? I called the hotel and got myself transferred to the front desk, and explained the situation. The woman I spoke to was very apologetic, lots of “ohh, I’m so sorry!” But I told her to please go ahead and enjoy the flowers, keep them at the front desk if they like, whatever they want…because we’re getting more delivered on Saturday!

It’s 9°F today, with a wind chill of -1° - it was colder yesterday. My winter coat picked this past Saturday to break completely, of course. It is a really ugly coat, I don’t even remember where I got it, I know it was secondhand. But it was warm and soft and served its purpose even though it was ugly. That is, until recently. A month or so ago, the zipper started opening from the bottom whenever I sat down. Not great, but I could deal with it. Then this past Friday, one of the pockets ripped halfway off. Annoying, but I could still deal with it. Until Saturday, when the tab of the zipper broke off, and I was left with only the slider and not the part you pull it up and down with.

So it was definitely time to get a new winter coat. I was going to go to the mall last night but I ended up purchasing one online instead. I remembered from reading catalogs as a kid that Lands’ End had good parkas, and I ended up buying their Stadium Squall Parka in black. I had it shipped via Express UPS for an additional $8, because I’m still wearing the old one and I want the new one now. I don’t have any other coats that are longer than waist-length, and with the current temperatures I need a long coat, so I am just putting up with it until my new one comes.

• My custom earphone kit came today; I had a problem with it and it didn’t come out quite the way I expected. They don’t take returns, but I e-mailed and let them know what happened and they’re going to replace it! I’ll reserve my review for then.
• I finally heard back from the farm about my Cat’s Meow piece. Turns out they are interested after all! I think all three of mine already have homes, but when I get them I will send pictures and they can order more of their own if they like.
• Yesterday I signed up for this tour of the Grand Canyon for next month when we’re in Las Vegas. It was about $220 for two people. I realized I never got a confirmation e-mail, so I went back to the site…and it now says $190 for two people. I signed up last night! I eventually did get the confirmation e-mail and it has the $220 price, so I am going to call them tomorrow and ask about it. There are plenty of other tour operators, if they won’t give me the lower price I might ask for a refund - then again, there’s a $25 cancellation fee, and that’s the difference anyway. We’ll see what happens when I call.

On Saturday, we went to Leesburg Outlets, where I looked high and low for a pair of embellished jeans. In the entire mall I found exactly one pair that fit…except they were too long. One place I didn’t check was the Coldwater Creek outlet, because I figured they wouldn’t have that kind of thing. But I checked their website yesterday and they do have embellished jeans! We have a store locally, so today I called them up and asked if they had any in my size. They had two in the size below mine, and one in the size above…but none in my size. So I saved time by calling, but I had to order them over the web.

I almost never order clothes (other than t-shirts) online, and I wasn’t sure if I should get a petite size or not. The ones I tried on over the weekend were way too long, so I ended up ordering these in my size (petite), and these in my size (regular). Whichever fits, I’ll keep; the other I’ll return to the store in Tyson’s.

But good grief, they were expensive. They were $43 and $49 respectively, but shipping was $11! Because I live in a state where they have a brick and mortar store, taxes were an additional $4.65. If I had only ordered one pair, shipping would still have been $10, so I’m not losing too much that way - I’ll only lose half the tax when I end up returning one of them. But still - why on earth should two pairs of jeans cost $11 to ship? I’m quite certain I could put them into a flat rate Priority Mail box and send them off for $4.05…they are just raking in the dough with those extra shipping charges.