To balance out my last entry, I want to share the experience I had this afternoon:
Shopping for some hardware, and specifically for 'bulldog clips.' I didn't know they were called that, just that they are those metal clips that sometimes have magnets on them, so you can clip them to the fridge and hang pictures with them.
I drove to Home Depot. No luck. Wal-Mart had some, in two packs with colored plastic pieces. I needed all silver. Target. No luck. Getting ready to head out to Bed Bath and Beyond, I decided to pull out my GPS and cell phone. With the GPS, I identified all the hardware and craft stores within a 10-miles radius. (In Virginia, that amounts to a billion stores. In Utah, I'd have been lucky to get one.) With the cell phone, I called each one.
Eliminated them all. But at least I didn't have to drive to them all to do that.
And the point of this post is that while I was sitting there in the car, marvelling at how cool my GPS is, I thought to myself, "the pioneers didn't have GPS, and it would have taken them ALL DAY to go to each of those stores to see if anybody has those clips!"
I proceeded to think through the fact that pioneers wouldn't have had that many stores, wouldn't have gone to them all, wouldn't have needed the clips in the first place, would probably have died of dysentery years ago...
Anyway, then I came home and used the Inter-webs to find more info. That was when I learned the name "bulldog clip" and found a craft store 11 miles away that actually had them in stock.
So I went and bought 20 of them. For four dollars. Then went to the library and checked out comic books and a Tom Clancy novel.
Now I'm going to go make dinner and start working on a fun project.