The Great Search for Deals
Shobhit gets another Social Review point! We got so many coupons out of both our renewal of membership to VegFest and Shobhit volunteering for it, we decided to use one of them since they pretty much all expire by the end of June, and maybe half of them by the end of May. Typically they are buy-one-entrée, get-one-free. We actually have four such coupons for Wedgwood II Vegetarian Thai on Broadway on Capitol Hill, which is so many we almost certainly won't manage to burn through them all before they all expire. But, we did burn through one of them last night.
Shobhit really wanted to use two of the coupons and just use one of them to order takeout, and have them for lunches later this week. The "fine print" says "one per person." The waitress assured us they will only take one per table.
Shobhit pushed back a little bit, but not much; and actually said "Okay" and put away the spare coupon pretty quickly. (This just occurred to me: maybe I should have just sat at a different table! Or maybe I should not have said that; I don't actually want to give Shobhit ideas he will embarrassingly take seriously.) Shobhit also tried to order his spice level at "American five, Thai eight." Usually places are happy to indulge him in his insistence that he wants his dish ridiculously spicy, but this lady just kept repeating, "We just go up to five." Technically she was very patient with him, but honestly her tone of voice said, I don't have time for your bullshit. In Shobhit's defense, he wasn't being pushy or rude, and when he later noted that this lady was not very friendly, he was right.
That said, like a good customer, he did leave a tip that was proportional to the full value of the two dishes. He said she brightened up when she saw that.
By the way, somehow I also completely forgot about the two different $50 gift cards to select regional restaurants that we got for Christmas from Dad and Sherri. They were still on the back shelf of my desk; I came out to the living room with them and said, "We've been sitting on a hundred bucks all this time!" But then I remembered we had already decided we would save one of them for use as our anniversary dinner in Portland on June 14. That still leaves the other one to use sometime in Seattle. We still decided last night we should get to using up some of our excess of two-for-one coupons.
We walked there from home, which gave us a bit over two miles of walking round trip -- a good thing, since he wound up picking me up after work yesterday. He had just finished with a walkthrough and drug test at Total Wine & More on 15th Avenue. I wouldn't normally pass up the walk home from work but for some reason yesterday I thought, why not?
Shobhit needed some black pants. He got a pair at the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thrift store, where I also found a pair of pretty short shorts I'd kind of love to get, but the waist size is 29". I wear 30" so it might still be fine. I should maybe have tried them on but I didn't. The things were only six bucks. I should go back later.
We went home, had some ice cream, and watched Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Veep, Barry, and Shobhit went to the bedroom to read a book while I watched Real Time with Bill Maher (which Shobhit has kind of given up on because he finds it "depressing"; I still like it but my interest is steadily waning as Bill Maher locks into his out-of-touch, willfully ignorant grandpa perspectives), and then he came back out to watch an episode of Cheers.
I was up a little later than usual after that as I researched places to stay in Syracuse. Danielle called and we kind of made a deal. She told me she can't stop obsessing over getting a hotel room in Niagara Falls with a view of the actual falls. She's come around to wanting it so much she changed her mind about not being willing to stay in a place with an exorbitant parking surcharge. So this is the deal: she'll just find a place she wants in Niagara Falls, where we're staying for just one night, and she'll pay for it. She then left it up to me to find a place in Syracuse.
She still had some parameters. We're already sharing a bed for two night in Toronto, and possibly the third night in Niagara Falls, and she wants at least a couple of nights with a bed of her own. I'm basically on board with that. She also doesn't want to be a place so cheap it's run down. The other thing is, the wedding in Syracuse will provide a shuttle bus, which we want to be able to use so we can both drink and not worry about driving. Said shuttle will only pick up in either downtown (where the hotel with blocked out rooms for the wedding is located -- itself not an option for us as it has the stupid price of at minimum $189/night), or a neighborhood called Hawley-Green, which is adjacent to downtown but across the freeway from it. It's where Elise's dad found an AirBnB.
But, it's with these parameters that I basically discovered last night it severely limits our options. Literally no AirBnB with a nightly price of less than $100 and also has two beds is available in either of those neighborhoods. And I found a single hotel that fit these parameters that is located downtown, on Hotels.com -- except the $96/night rate is for a room with only a single, king bed. They do have rooms with two beds, but that kicks the nightly price up to $112, bringing it to a total of $224, $54 more than the $170 I currently have budgeted for Syracuse lodging.
I can maybe eat that cost, though. We'll see. I exchanged texts with Danielle this morning and, before I book anything, I will sit down with Shobhit tonight and do a search once more with him, with the aforementioned search parameters in place (having to be located in either downtown or Hawley-Green is the real kicker here), and see if Shobhit manages to find something I somehow missed. If he doesn't, then I will book the $112/night room. Either way, I'm booking something tonight. That will then leave Niagara Falls lodging, and our travel booking confirmations will finally be all set. Well, for that particular trip, anyway.
In other, but related news, I found a bunch of cool things yesterday, to check out in both Toronto and Niagara Falls. I tried a search for cool things to see in Syracuse, too, and so far the best I have found is a downtown park. But hey, whatever works! Most of our time in Syracuse will be occupied by the rehearsal dinner and the wedding anyway.
[posted 12:15 pm]