It never seems to fail. You decide to take a day off so you can get all these things done and before you know it the day is done and there are still items on your list that you never got to.
Sigh.
After putting up a short post this morning I was about to head out to the grocery store when Paul Skalny called. Paul and I are planning on doing a podcast on New Years Eve and we had hoped to have HoCo mega church preacher, David Anderson as our guest. We want to focus the show around loco New Years resolutions and we thought it might be fun to have some spiritual perspective. Unfortunately we learned today that the good reverend will be out of town and unable to join us. This led to a lengthly discussion about who we could get instead. Names were bought up, bantered about and discarded. We finally reached consensus on an old Wilde Lake High classmate of mine. I called him on my way to the store. I was now about an hour behind.
I don’t know what the situation was later in the day but this morning the Giant in Lyndwood was relatively calm. The store manager was directing one of his staff to bring more snow shovels out of the back. Shovels were selling like hotcakes today.
By the time I left the store the road situation had begun to get dicey. It wasn’t so much the snow as it was the ice. The roads were pretty slick and though I saw a few cars doing the old slip side, I didn’t see any accidents. Back home I unloaded the groceries. Making chili was on my priority list today and now at least I had the necessary ingredients.
Next stop was the Wine Bin in Ellicott City . This is no time to run low on wine. In fact Dave Carney says that his business does very well when these winter storms hit. People stop in on their way home from work before hunkering down for the night. This afternoon however, there was only one other customer in the store and it wasn’t long before Dave was uncorking a bottle of wine for us to taste. We toasted the holidays. I love this store!
Leaving the Wine Bin I crossed the street to Classic Interiors. During Midnight Madness I noticed Mama Wordbones taking special interest in an item there and so now Santa was circling back to pick it up. I ended up speaking with the store owner, Carolyn Gaughan. It turns out that Carolyn has made quite a retail journey in HoCo. Her original location was in The Mall some thirty years ago. When then mall anchor store Woodward & Lothrop closed up shop, her business took a hit and so when it came time to renew her lease she opted instead to move to Savage Mill. After several years in the mill, she moved her store to a new space in Ellicott City behind Su Casa two years ago. It’s a very unique space that seems to fit her wares well.
She said that business is good, much better than last year.
Nobody had a good year last year.
Back home I realized that I needed to clear the driveway before I did anything else. That took me right up to 4:00 PM when I needed to have a phone conference with a developer about a clients lease renewal. I didn’t get started on my chili until five o’clock.
Now, with the pot of chili slowly simmering away on the stove, I’ve poured a glass a wine and pulled out the laptop. All in all I'd have to say it was a good day; I may not have accomplished everything I set out to do but right now it seems that it was just enough.