I am buying a parking garage!!!!

So does anybody else agree with me that paying to park is the most ridiculous thing in the world? Okay so I can see the theory behind it for really super overly crowded places, like booming metropolises or college campuses where there truly never is enough parking to go around. Because then the idea is to discourage any one person from hogging a valuable space all day when there is such a shortage of spaces. I get it.

But in downtown Salt Lake when I'm driving around the MASSIVE parking garage seeing literally hundreds of open parking spaces is it really necessary?

As a child I used to find going downtown so exiting. Now I just find it highly annoying. And they don't really have that much to offer that I can't find elsewhere. Do I really need to pay five bucks to park to shop at Old Navy when there is perfectly good Old Navy at Jordan Landing where parking is FREE?

And I'm getting more jaded about the topic the more time goes on. Let me share a few of my most recent experiences.

For my anniversary my husband took me to one of the nicer (i.e. more expensive) restaurants for dinner. We had a reservation so we didn't have to wait forever for a table. And eating was ALL we did was eat because I had to get back to the baby in time to nurse him. We dropped a bunch of dough on appetizers, specialty (non-alcholoic) drinks, dinner, and dessert. It was anniversary #5 so yea, we splurged. We got a validation on the way out. They still charged us to park. I say if you eat out your validation covers you the ENTIRE TIME you are eating, and not just for an hour.

For Adam's birthday we decided to take the kids to the The Discovery Gateway to the special Sesame Street exhibit. We opted for the annual pass (and then still had to pay 3 bucks extra a person to get into the Sesame Street exhibit....don't EVEN get me started on that!) so right away we had dropped 125 cool ones. (yes, you heard me right) So imagine how MORTIFIED I was when upon leaving we were told we could BUY a validation for a buck. BUY? You mean the $125 I spent on the way in didn't count? I still have to BUY a validation?

So then we go over to the food court and eat lunch, because traveling in the car with starving kids is no fun.

Then we hop on over to Famous Footwear's BOGO sale to get Mike some tennis shoes and we spend another nice wad there. (at least there they gave us a validation at no extra charge.)

So now we've spent close to $200 and upon leaving the parking garage are still told that we owe money for parking. How much do I have to spend to get free parking??????

At this point you would think I would learn my lesson. But no. Since I bought the annual pass we have to use it to get our money's worth, right? So I wake up this morning feeling like I want to get out of the house. (because if I stay home I see all the things I should be cleaning and I just really didn't want to clean today.) So my first attempt at something fun failed miserably. So I thought we'd just run over to the Gateway for a few hours.

We play for a little while and I begrudgingly buy my $1 validation. And when I hand over my ticket and validation to the parking attendant she tells me I still owe 2 bucks! I'm furious at this point and know that anything that comes out of my mouth I'm just going to regret later so I fork it over and drive off. But the further I drive the madder I become. I was told that my "validation" covered me for 3 hours. I pulled into the parking garage at 11:35 and handed my ticket to the parking attendant at 2:52. 3 hours and 17 minutes. Are you seriously telling me that it costs 2 bucks to park for 17 minutes???? (since my validation was supposed to cover the first 3 hours) So either the parking attendant was a real winner and doesn't know how to do her job and way over charged me or the Gateway has REALLY crappy parking rates. Either way I'm pissed about it and now wish I would've said all those things I was thinking earlier today.

I mean isn't charging to park counter productive? Isn't the point of a shopping mall to get people to stay, linger, shop, impulse buy. If we are all watching to clock to get out of the parking garage by a certain magical time before we get charged aren't we WAY less likely to drop loads of money shopping? I mean really.

I'm committed to the annual pass now for 11 more months, but I seriously doubt I will ever get one again. They lost my business over a lousy 3 bucks. How pathetic is that?

You know when you are a blogaholic when....

Blogging is a relatively new hobby (er, addiction) of mine. I thought I had my hobby (er, addiction) under control until a few incidents occurred this weekend making it very clear that I truly have a problem. So, Hi, My name is Nicole and I'm a blogaholic.

Friday morning I had taken the kids to the Murray library to story time. There were several thing that happened that morning that I thought would make great blog posts so I was storing them away in the back of my mind to write about later.

Later that day I was with Mike in the car driving somewhere and I thought about telling him all about the incidents at story time at the library, but then I thought that if I told him it would spoil it for him when he read about it in my blog later. Yes, that was really my train of thought. As if my blog is akin to a good movie or something....

"Hey, have you read Nicole's blog today?"
"Not yet, don't tell me what happened!"

Apparently blogging has taken the place of having real, one on one relationships and conversations.

Saturday Mike was hanging our new dining chandelier, a job that should've taken less than an hour but because the builder who built our home cut corners like crazy it turned into a multi-hour job. Somewhere about 3 hours into it I said to him, "well, look on the bright side. Now you'll have something to blog about."

clean and clear

My face was feeling a bit extra oily today and so I decided to use some of my facial astringent. You know the stuff, you dump it on a cotton ball and rub it all over your face to leave it feeling "tingly" and clean. So I rummage for a cotton ball and pull my bottle out of the medicine cabinet. As I opened the bottle something in the back of my mind registered that something was not quite right, like it smelled a little off....but I kept moving forward, because as a mother of 3 small ones I only get very short snipits of time to myself and if I didn't hurry little hands would soon be pounding at the bathroom door. So onto the cotton ball and onto my face the product goes.....and then when the "tingle" turned into a BURN I realized what was wrong. I never realized it before but the finger nail polish remove is the same color as my clean and clear.

Memo to self, buy the blue colored facial cleaner next time.

my blogging opinion, for what it's worth

So it is my humble opinion that anybody who ALREADY has both a blog and a flickr account should be using their flickr account to add photos to their blog. Because they work so beautifully and seamless together so it makes no sense not to do it that way and it drives me slightly nuts when people don't.

And anybody who blogs and doesn't have a flickr account should get a flickr account.

And even if you don't blog but you like to look at or share pictures online you should also get flickr account. because basically flickr is THE BEST photo sharing site ever (for reasons I'll go into if you really want me to....) so there.

that's all. for now.

ing

The kids are all asleep so I was cleaning up the kitchen and had every intention of finishing up the rest of the laundry folding. But the laptop was sitting there on the kitchen counter....taunting me, teasing me. So now instead of dishes and laundry I am blogging and flickring.

And don't you love how you can make any word a verb by adding ing to the end. Because let's face it flickring sounds so much more cool and important then "looking at photos on flickr and uploading some of my own"

talk about the weather

So, a lot of the blogs I read have been talking about the weather lately, so I hate to do ANOTHER weather post....but it just really is getting old!!!! spring, winter, spring, winter. I just can't take it anymore. We were at the Gateway on Monday kids were in their swimsuits playing in the Olympic Fountain. Then rain and snow on Tuesday. Today was nice again not quite play in the swimsuit nice, but the kids played outside without sweaters. So just now I pulled up my Google homepage to check up on any new blog posts and my weather feed says it will be nice again tomorrow (74 degrees) and snow again on Sunday!!!! Come on already. When we gonna get spring for real?????

Haunted by the need to be perfect

Although blogging is a relatively new addiction for me I have taken to it wholeheartedly. Maybe a little too much. What started out as a way just to express myself and to write again (I've missed writing!) and also just to record the going ons of our growing family has become a relentless pursuit of perfection. (all this is one short month!)

See, I've started having the urge to make every post really great! Like simply writing what was on my mind wasn't good enough. Everything had to be "worth reading". Call it the writer in me I guess. Or maybe it's because I knew this wasn't just merely a "journal" but that other people were going to actually be reading this (a special thanks to my reading audience of 3 1/2 for coming back again after the first post)

The problem is that I now have this long list of things I want to blog about that I've never gotten around to writing because I'm waiting for the "inspiration" to make it truly memorable.

Case in point. Adam's birthday was over a week ago now. And I've been wanting to write about it. I've even been picking out the perfect pictures to use. But I wanted to make it this awesome post that was funny and insightful and special for Adam, too. Like I had this idea of starting out by talking about all the things that happened on April 6, 2004. So I literally spent an hour and a half last night trying to search news archives to find out what happened that day. (I have only 3 memories of that day really. hours and hours of labor, finding out that Sister Hinckley died, and that it was Elton John night on American Idol.) You would think in this age of Google that such a task would be a piece of cake but an hour and half later I was mad at myself for wasting so much time and not being any closer to having a "cool" blog entry!

When maybe really the point is to just start writing. And maybe it won't be perfect. And maybe some won't even be funny. (scandal, I know) But write anyway! The magic is in the writing.

and perhaps this is also an analogy for the rest of my life as well. Maybe I don't need to wait for inspiration or perfection to do other things, either. Maybe I should just start.

I love Mondays!

Crazy, huh? I mean NOBODY likes Monday. But we have a new routine at our house that makes me simply adore Mondays.

You see, Monday is laundry day.



So we stay home all day. I usually run around in my most comfortable sweats or work out clothes and the kids hang out in jammies all day. I don't try to get any other housework done, it's just laundry day. So in the morning while clothes are washing I play a lot with the kids in between changing over loads.

After lunch and after all the clothes are clean it is movie time. So we hop in the car and go get our free Monday rental at Red Box. (you too can get a free movie code texted to your cell phone each Monday)

Then we watch movies while we fold all the many loads of laundry. I usually rent a chick flick, something I know my husband will hate and I get to watch it without all the peanut gallery remarks.

Meals are low-key on Mondays, too. Like today the kids and I are eating pop tarts and popcorn for lunch. Dinner will be left overs from Sunday dinner last night.

So tell me truly now, what's not to love about Mondays?

A HUGE Colossal Waste of time!

But it made me laugh my head off because this has happened to me almost EXACTLY like this SO many times I've lost count. So if you have 10 minutes to waste check it out It's mildly hypnotic and you can't look away. You want to but you can't. You have to see how it ends.

It's 10 minutes of your life you will never get back.

Doing the happy dance

Went to our accountant tonight and did our taxes. We're getting a refund. I'm doing the happy dance! (which is not to be confused with the sacred boot up dance. )