Out of the frying pan and into Poway

Poway is a nice little community on the other side of I-15 from us. Its downtown is maybe 5 miles from our house. On Saturday, I noticed that our car needed some gas, so we ventured over to their Costco instead of the Carmel Mountain one (w/no gas pumps) that's a little closer. We knew it would be hot over there, but were rather dismayed to be driving down the main drag and see a bank thermometer proclaim that it was 120 degrees F. When we got to Costco, I stepped out of the car to fill 'er up, and felt like I was in the Costco rotisserie chicken roaster. Inside the store, Marie overheard one woman telling another that it was 111 at her house, and she was going to hang at Costco for the next 4 hours until it closed. When we had finally purchased our groceries and breached the air curtain to go outside, I recall feeling like we had just been hit with a huge wall of car exhaust. This turned out to be rather humorous since, as I was loading our pile into the van, I actually felt the exhaust on my shin, and it was cooler than the ambient temperature. Back at our house, it was a 'comfortable' 90 degrees, although combined with our current 70% humidity and no AC, it's pretty bad. We're told that it's almost never this hot or humid. The temperature gradient is very real, though, and San Diego County has lots of microclimates. The coast is nearly always in the 70's, with the temperature variation increasing by the mile as you go inland. The nightly ritual of getting air to circulate through the house has made me pine for Dad's fan-on-steroids device that we used at 800 Fisk. Remember how that thing could slam the sewing room door? It's a wonder the door didn't get ripped off its hinges and sucked into the air intake.

On Monday of this week, I tested the limits of the Costco return policy, and came away considering a Costco ankle tattoo. It will surprise none of my non-Tato-skin-eating family members to know that I make questionable purchase decisions. For some reason, on the drive home from work on Monday, serious buyer's remorse hit after owning a $1200 Vizio 37" LCD flat screen TV for about 2 months. I just decided that for the time being, the TV might be considered riotous living. Many of you may be wondering "what made Scott buy it in the first place?". The answer is that 2 months ago, we had just finished a rather difficult english-japanese translation for my dad-in-law, which made me feel like we had some extra dough. Oh yeah - the world cup was about to start, too (we had just gotten digital cable for the occasion, which we then canceled last week). So we loaded up the TV into the car, and with no receipt, successfully returned it to Costco. The employees weren't exactly overjoyed to see it being wheeled in, but they took it anyway, and in the end, were nice about it. It is sometimes a humiliating experience to return stuff, and this was no exception. I'm kind of getting the hang of it, though. In the last 6 months, I've returned a prepaid cell-phone, a juicer, DVDs, a DVD burner, and a color printer. I know I may be a marked man, now, but Costco is basically the only place we shop, so I think they still make money on us.

Here are some random pictures from the beach last week. Kai is eating sand (as usual), and Jerome is making the obligatory 'tunnel'. Mari used an innovative technique for removing sand from the kids which involves talcum powder (see pic where Asha's crossing her eyes.