D'oh... Yay! D'oh... Sigh.

Warning: boring story, but one which kinda sums up how my life is going, to follow.

I had some time before the movie tonight, so I moseyed over to the bookstore. When I moseyed back to the theater, I discovered that my pocket - not me, mind you, my pocket - had dropped my parking ticket somewhere along the way. When validated, said parking ticket would allow me to exit the garage for free; when missing, said parking ticket would cost me $12. D'oh... Never mosey - bad things ensue.

So after the movie (The Incredibles, and yeah, it was as good as you're hearing), despite an aching foot from an earlier shoe incident (don't ask), I retraced my steps exactly - even the part where I jaywalked to avoid an oncoming train rather than wait for the bloody thing to pass through the main strip (think I'm nuts and you've obviously never had to wait for a bloody train to pass through the main strip). Into the bookstore, past the calendars, through one area of magazines, to the cookbooks, back through another area of magaz -- THERE IT WAS!!! The other shoppers seemed a bit confused about my excitement upon finding what they probably considered trash, but. Yay! There it was - no one had thrown it away, no one had even stepped on it.

So I limped back to the garage, completely bypassing the theater where I should've validated the ticket. (D'oh...) Ever the rationalist, I remembered doing that before and the guy at the gate looked at my ticket stub to ensure I had been in the theater, and then let me pass for free. Not so with tonight's cashier. Apparently, she couldn't do that anymore because allegedly they'd gotten a new system and supposedly the actual ticket itself had to be validated. Riiiiiiiiight.

She did offer to let me park the car right there (with 10 cars behind me) and run across the street to validate the ticket and save $6. My head said "uh, yeah, lady - I live and drive with these Oakland drivers every day, I've seen their wrath, and I'm sure me holding them up for 5 minutes will go over REAL well. That's a great idea." But my mouth said "Heh heh, no that's okay, my foot kinda hurts and hey at least I didn't have to pay the whole $12 for a lost ticket here's the $6 boy have I learned my lesson heh heh." Sigh.

And thus is my life these days. It's almost calculated, the d'oh-yay-d'oh-sigh cycles of my day. Perhaps this shall all pass in time.