cheers to syracuse
If our economy is still doing so great, there sure have been a lot of major company or store closures. Whatever the reason, Shobhit and I have sure gone out of our way to cash in on it, getting clearance deals either on or near the last day of business at the Ross Dress for Less in Northgate; the H&M Store downtown; and the Sears in Puyallup -- which we drove all the way to on their last day and managed to get our current flat screen TV. It has a small black dot on the left side of the screen that never goes away, and has since developed its own habit of brightening and dimming at random, but whatever; we got it for fifty bucks!
Next on the chopping block is J.C. Penny, and its Northgate store set to close May 3. I'll be far too busy with my Birth Week then to go shopping there probably, so we've been talking about going this week to check out what sales are already going on, with three weeks left to go.
We were going to go Monday night, and we walked out to dinner on Capitol Hill instead. Then we were going to go last night, and Shobhit basically changed his mind after we had our veggie chicken sandwiches and roasted potatoes for dinner, instead watching Santa Clarita Diet and Cheers pretty much all evening. We finished up season five of Cheers, thereby ending the 45% of the show's 11-season history that starred Shelley Long. Once we start into season six, we'll be into the Kirstie Alley years, which lasted a year longer than Shelley Long's did. Incidentally, both Shelley Long and Kirstie Alley went on to do movies after leaving Cheers, and although neither of them became genuine movie stars, I would argue that Kirstie Alley's movie career fared a bit better. (A quick Google indicates Alley's current net worth at $30 million and Long's at $10 million, but then it's been so long that it perhaps means little to a comparison specifically between their film careers, which were relatively short lived for both of them.)
I have been noticing a kind of dual trend while watching all the old seasons of Cheers. Shobhit actually commented on the good writing in its first couple of seasons, when its ratings were lowest. And while the show remains pretty great overall, its episode-to-episode storylines by season five had gotten comparatively gimmicky and less realistic. I guess that's often how it goes, though: a reverse correlation between quality and popularity. We'll see how good the writing still seemed to have been in the later Kirstie Alley years, when the show was at its ratings peak.
There was one other thing that happened last night, which was a little ridiculous but whatever, I'll take what I can get: as I said in yesterday's post that I intended to do, I had Shobhit do a hotel search for Danielle's and my two Syracuse dates, with the parameters of downtown / Hawley-Greene and a room with two beds, to see if he might find a better hotel than I did. And, in a less severe but still similar shock to when he had suggested I buy a $400 bottle of tequila, he suggested I book a hotel that was more expensive than the one I had found.
Bear in mind, he thought it was $17 per night more than the hotel I had chosen -- actually, it was $1 more per night. This is because of Hotels.com's often misleading price listings, at least when you're looking for a room with two beds: the $96/room listing had only one bed. I had already said booking that hotel with two beds in the room actually bumps the price up to $112/night. And he found an admittedly better, nicer hotel that had two beds in the room for $113/night. This is because I had filtered it down to a maximum of $100/night, and he had not.
So anyway it's all done now: two nights' stay, May 31 - June 2, at Hotel Skyler Syracuse, "Tapestry Collection by Hilton" (whatever that means). It is a pretty stately looking building, and nice enough that suddenly Shobhit had the opposite attitude of what he'd been having up to this point: "It's nice enough it makes it worth visiting." He literally said that. What the hell? I guess it's only okay to spend more than intended if it's his idea.
Anyway the hotel is 1.2 miles from the official hotel of the wedding party, which should make it fairly easy for the shuttle bus to pick us up -- and even if not, that's an easy, 26-minute walk for us just to come to the hotel where the shuttle is already coming anyway.
So that just leaves us with the Niagara Falls hotel left to book. Danielle has agreed to pay for that one even if it means it'll be the most expensive -- she remains obsessed with getting a room with a falls view -- so, whatever, she can take her time on that. She's thinking about changing the car rental back to two days instead of three, even though it's more expensive, but it's not as much more expensive as it is to pay the huge fee to park at one of the hotels with views. With that the only thing that's left, I'm fine with her just taking however long it takes her.
[posted 12:19 pm]