so it turns out that the fire i saw on saturday night–the one spewing massive amounts of black smoke into the already-filthy houston air–is an enormous tire fire. funny, that’s what i predicted it was yesterday when becca and i drove up the highway and could still see it smoking. i couldn’t think of anything that would put out that much thick black smoke except 1) oil or 2) tires. and it looked too close to us/too far from the ship channel to be oil. so tires it is. apparently someone abandoned a stolen car and decided to torch it right next to an abandoned 3-acre tire dump. lovely.
i mean, come on! what, does someone just think “well, i need to get rid of the car, i think i’ll torch it. oh, and what better place to torch it than at the front gate of a huge tire dump!” sheesh. idiots. to add to the sketchiness, no one can find the owner of the dump. yes, just another day in houston.
so yesterday afternoon i got the urge to go to ikea. i loooooooooove ikea!! anyway, i called becca and she came along, so off we went. i was looking for two things:
- a table for the top of my stairs
- a suitable table/shelf for use in my little bathroom darkroom
i came home with:
- a table for the top of my stairs
- a bookcase that will work well in the darkroom
- a wooden cd shelf
- two colorful ceramic serving bowls
- a ceramic pitcher
- two big fuzzy pillows (like susan’s!), one red and one blue
- 3 candles
- a flower-shaped candle holder
- a blue-tinted flower vase
- a bendable wooden man like i always wanted when i was younger and more artistic
- the 2003 ikea catalog
{happy sigh} i love that place. i must be the only person in the world who could live happily ever after even if confined to shopping only at target and ikea. iiiikkkkeeeeaaaa. i think i should go work for them, designing cool furniture. i would enjoy that immensely. and they would have one very enthusiastic employee.
so i was looking at my credit card statement online last night and was dismayed to find that my fluke of luck has run out. see, i realized over a month ago that sta travel never charged me for my plane ticket to scotland. wow! that was a $500 charge that magically never appeared! of course i thought it was too good to be true, but when it hadn’t appeared when we left to go to scotland, and still hadn’t appeard when we came back, and still hadn’t appeared when i got my last statement, i figured maybe i was going to get lucky. i decided i’d wait until the end of the year before i wrote the charge out of my budget, and forgot about it. well, unfortunately for me, sta accounting does their job well because on the 16th they finally charged me for the flight. the charge didn’t come from sta even, it came from their accounting department. so someone checking over the books found the mistake. ah well. i’ll not seriously upset, after all, i do owe them the money. but i wouldn’t have minded if they’d forgotten… 
