blech

I think I have a stomach virus. I started having a stomach ache yesterday a little before lunch. I thought I was just hungry, but it started getting worse about an hour after I ate. Then I started getting chills and feeling nauseous. I was miserable the rest of the day at work. As soon as we got home I just laid in bed for awhile, then spent the rest of the night on the couch, trying to get comfortable. Besides my stomach ache, my lower back was really hurting for some reason, so I kept moving around and adjusting pillows and blankets to try to minimize the pain. I didn't get much sleep; I kept tossing and turning, and when I did fall asleep I would have hallucinating dreams about websites about missing children and bread recipes. Very weird, and not very restful.

I feel a little better today. If I was at maybe 50% yesterday, I'm up to maybe 70% today. I ate a little oatmeal and had some juice for breakfast, which hurt but was probably good for me. It also meant I was able to take an aleve, so my back feels better. And at least I'm just sitting all day, whenever I stand up I get nauseous. But hey, at least I was down a couple pounds this morning! :)

Oh yeah, and my friend had her baby yesterday - it's a boy!

not much to report

One of the girls in my book club is in labor! She's the first one due in a string of about 7 or 8, one's due every few weeks from May to October. She's actually 3 weeks early, so hopefully everything goes fine. There were 4 babies born in the group this winter, now with the new crop starting our meetings should be pretty lively! Luckily there's a few of us staying "strong till 2009" so I'm not the only one getting my baby fix whenever we meet.

Anyway... Ellery got an early birthday present the other day, so he gave us a ride around the driveway last night. Door to door service. Pretty sweet, huh? Alfred wants one, of course. But I don't have a car, or a computer, so I think I get the next toy, right?

Slow blog day here. So go look at this website I found yesterday. It's funny. This is my favorite one.

more domesticity

Apparently we couldn't slow back down to our usual leisurely weekend pace after all the excitement of the past couple weeks. Saturday we hit up the farmers market, ran some errands, I cleaned, baked some bread (which didn't rise because I killed the yeast by using water that was too hot), we went for a nice long walk (which resulted in me being sore the rest of the weekend), and got started on some apple butter. Sunday we finished the apple butter (which turned out really well), made some strawberry orange jam (early taste tests indicate success), spent almost 2 hours trying to boil water to seal all those jars of deliciousness, went to the beach, baked some rolls for dinner, and caught up on the last 2 or so weeks of tv. Craziness. A good weekend overall though, and having an extra day off didn't hurt either. I'd have more pictures, but our camera battery died this weekend and the charger and spare were both at the office in the computer case I used as a carry on to go to Minnesota, and I forgot to get the pictures Katie took. My bad.

Completely unrelated... have I ever mentioned my inability to stay awake for our drive to work? Probably twice a week I fall asleep during our morning drive. Today, for example, I passed out for about 15 minutes. It's a nice little nap, but sometimes (like this morning) I end up kind of disoriented and more tired when I wake up. Luckily the AC in our building is fixed, so the cold jolts me back into reality pretty quickly. Until the hypothermia sets in, then I'm out again.

day off

No post yesterday because I took the day off! It was my parents' last day here so I played hooky. But first, some pictures of mom's birthday cheesecake. Decoration courtesy of Katie.


The bottom layer is brownie, then a layer of caramel, then a layer of cheesecake. It was gooey and delicious. Luckily we ate most of it already, so there's not much more for me to gorge myself on.


Yesterday we went to Fort Matanzas, which I'd never been to but wanted to go to. I didn't realize it was free, so that was cool. Then afterwards we went to the beach. It was much nicer than last weekend when we tried to go to the beach; then we left after only an hour because it was so cold. We were there for maybe 3 1/2 hours yesterday. I got a little sunburned. I had Katie do sunscreen on my left arm so I didn't have to get sunscreen on my burn wound, and she missed a little patch on my shoulder. You like how I sell her out? I also missed a little spot on the backs of both knees. So that'll be fun until it fades.

Speaking of my burn, the blister popped the other night when I was washing dishes, and it oozed for the next 24 hours. It seems like it's finally dried out this morning and maybe starting to heal now. It still looks disgusting and hurts. I have a band aid tan line on that finger.

We also went out to dinner last night. We walked to the restaurant, so Alfred, Katie, and I each brought along a beer for the road (which my parents did not know until right now). I then burst into the men's room accidentally. Apparently since we've been to that restaurant last, they switched the men's and women's restrooms. Totally not my fault. There was a guy at the urinal, but he had his back to me so he didn't see me, and there was no one else in line at that point. Still pretty embarrassing.

happy birthday mom!

Today's my mom's birthday. I'm guessing she didn't notice the link to this blog in the email I put it in, so she never comes here, which is good because she probably wouldn't like this picture. It's from Christmas last year, we all smoked out of the hookah together. It was a good old fashioned family Christmas. How old is she? Old enough to have a 27 year old daughter, that's how old!

I was making her birthday cheesecake last night (pictures will be here tomorrow, of course) and I burned my finger on the oven rack. Stupid. It blew up into a gross looking blister and hurt like a little bitch. It doesn't hurt this morning, but it's still nasty looking. I'll spare you a picture of that. For now. At least the burn is on my middle finger - middle finger injuries are kind of fun, as far as injuries go.

Also worthy to report: my dad caught a crab this morning! He's been going fishing off (what's left of) our dock every morning and hasn't been having much luck, he caught this little guy today though. I thought it was neat.

By the way, do you like my new banner at the top of the page?? I made it myself :)

thumbs up, say the astronauts

We heard back from the Army Corp yesterday - he's going to give us a permit! This is fantastic - he's the guy who we weren't sure was going to approve us, so this was a big hurdle to jump. There's still some legal stuff we have to take care of for him and for DEP, but it looks like we're going to be able to build where we want to! Now it's just a matter of time until we have all of the details taken care of and can actually start building. Alfred still thinks we won't be able to start until July, but at least we can do it! Definitely a weight lifted.

what do I want to be when I grow up?

We went to a Chinese place for lunch - how are these for some good fortunes?


Let's hope it's a good unexpected event.

So I'm debating lately what to do with myself next year, job-wise. I could stay where I am, doing something I'm not too crazy about, not making much money, but with lots of flexibility and something I could easily do part time when we have kids to keep making some money. Or I could try to get a teaching job next fall, which would be something I would enjoy (hopefully), use my degree, and make more money, but would totally lose the flexibility I have here, not to mention having to wake up at the butt crack of dawn every morning until we moved up here to get to work on time. I'm looking at getting a teaching job in the county we're hopefully moving to rather than where we live now. I tried that last summer, didn't happen. There are 2 districts up here I would apply to; the one we will (hopefully) live in would be closer and is better to work for, from what I hear; the other is easier to get a job in, but would require more driving (that county is huge, I could potentially be working an hour or more from our house). Also, since it's the city, more chance to be in a tougher school with harder to teach kids. Both counties pay roughly the same. It's not like I hate my job now, I enjoy being able to be lazy and not do much if I don't want to, but it gets boring sometimes. Not to mention demeaning, having to make coffee and answer phones. It's just nothing I ever pictured myself doing. However, if I stay here I can also focus on building up the made-to-order bakery business I've sort of started.

SO, I made a poll - vote on my life-altering decision please! :)

Opinion Polls & Market Research

weekend

My parents have been here since Friday evening, so we had lots of good food this weekend. We made beer can chicken on Saturday, it turned out so moist and delicious and wonderful, I loved it. I forgot to take a picture after they were cooked so here's the before - please enjoy the giblets I accidentally left on the pan. They look so funny sitting up.


Then yesterday, on 4/20, we smoked some pork. He he.


Alfred's parents and brother came over for dinner yesterday too, which was nice. I got to bake some rolls yesterday, which came out pretty good, and some honey oatmeal bread on Saturday, which was awesome! Best bread ever. I can't wait to make it again. I could seriously eat an entire loaf, I think. Totally forgot to take a picture of it, but bread's bread. I also made the black bean brownies, and my dad's been eating them. I almost feel bad not telling him about the beans, but not really.

The other fun thing from yesterday was that Katie caught a kitten! There are tons of cats that just roam our neighborhood, reproducing all the time. This one looks nice and healthy, and it's super cute and tiny. Its name is Jude Squeakers McKittycat. (It has some Irish from its father's side. We can tell because it likes to drink. Ha!) Katie was like the kitten whisperer, it was sort of creeping out from a pile of branches right at the edge of our property (because when we clean up the yard, we dump all the crap in the woods where our property meets the uncleared lot next to us), she just kind of clucked at it and it came right to her. She even went and bought it a bottle and some kitten milk so we could feed it. We were letting it drink out of a tupperware lid, it kept diving in, smearing its face around in it, and basically just getting milk all over itself and whoever was holding it. It's very cute, and surprisingly social considering it's wild. I wish we could keep it, but Alfred and I are both allergic and Katie tried the kitten thing last spring - it didn't work out. She has a friend at work who wants a kitten, so she might have found a home for it already.

house meeting #3

(James Blunt sucks. All of his songs are the same. Lame guitar/piano music, then the same 3 lines sung over and over and over. I bet they're easy to write. I know they're easy to get stuck in your head. Guess what we were listening to in the car.)

So Alfred went to another meeting about the new house yesterday. This one was with DEP, who we had already met at the house site and who indicated it wouldn't be any problem to get a permit from them. There was also a woman from Water Management there, and she apparently was not so easy. We now have to pay an engineer to say that our house will not cause the surrounding area to flood. It seems a little silly to have to go through this step, since we're surrounded by swamp, which is connected directly to a canal, which drains into a lake, which connects to the St Johns River. We are literally less than a mile from the lake, less than 2 from the river. We couldn't flood the area if we tried. But we have to pay someone to write this down for her. Stupid rules.

The good house news is that between moving the house by 5 feet and shrinking the pad a little, we only need to request a permit to fill .06 acres of land now. That's almost half of what it was before. We're submitting the paperwork to the Army Corp today, hopefully he'll be satisfied with what we've done and will just give us a damn permit. He said if it all looks ok, we can have a permit in 3-4 weeks! That would be great. I just hope he accepts it, he said at our meeting it's a 1 try thing, if he says no the first time we can't change it and try again. It's a little nerve wracking, but hopefully it will work out ok.

In other news, my parents are on their way down to visit. They left yesterday and should be here tonight around 6 or 7. We bought lots of meat and TP at Costco last night. I hope we make it through the week. My dad's on a diet because he's either borderline or actually diabetic, so I'm going to make a brownie recipe that has black beans and splenda instead of oil and sugar. I'm obviously not telling him that's what's in them until they're gone. I bet he'll like them until he finds out about the beans, then he'll hate them on principle. I made a similar recipe for the Superbowl and they were actually pretty good.

Hm, no pictures yet. Well, since Alfred's the one who bugs me when there are no pictures, here's an old one of him holding Ella. See, he totally loves babies!

MN continued

I got Katie's pictures last night, so here are some more from our trip! We went to a hibachi place for Lisa's birthday, it was kind of funny because the guy kept dropping stuff and messing up. He threw one of the eggs too high, it hit the ceiling and broke and fell into the shrimp, then he kept breaking the other ones when he tossed them on his spatula. He was rather entertaining. Look how snazzy we all are.


I was taking a picture of Ella playing with the Wii and Tony and Mason just happened to be in the bottom of the picture. I think it's so cute.


Drunky McDrunkersons.


Some more dress up.


Ella helped me make a cake one night. She kept sticking her fingers into the eggs as we beat them to see what it felt like. Then I turned around to get the pan, I turn back and the girl's coated in chocolate - she just dunked her hand in the batter and started licking it off. It got all over her bathrobe, her face, in her hair, everywhere. It was pretty damn funny. (Please note the bottle of gin behind her. She asked when we were putting that in the cake.)

back to real life

Our trip to Minnesota was awesome. We had lots of fun. We drank a lot, played lots of Uno and Wii, hung out. Thursday night we knocked back an impressive 7 bottles of wine. This isn't the best picture, but it's probably the funniest. Although Cathy has a sequence of 4 or 5 pictures of Tony that are hysterical.

The kids were super cute, of course. We watched some Star Wars, played some beads, several dozen rounds of hide and seek. A couple of times they hid so well we actually didn't find them, but I'm going to assume the 7 bottles of wine had something to do with that.

Also, lots and lots of Wii. Tony and Cathy don't have one (yet), their friend Lisa had just gotten one for her birthday and brought it over for us to play with. We all had sore arms and backs from all the boxing, but hey, at least we didn't just sit on our asses the whole weekend! Me boxing Tony (and losing, if I recall correctly; golf was my game):


Tony and Cathy resolving a marital dispute:


And Ella, with a little backup from Mason and his squirt gun:

in transit

We're coming at you LIVE from the Charlotte airport, gate B1. We left the house at 9:15, it's currently 2:02, and we've got one more flight to go! The excitement is never ending! Katie, how has your experience been so far today?


I'm trying to figure out which of these thousands of magazines I haven't read. Why do you keep bugging me? Can't you stop talking for 5 minutes?

Ok! Thank you for sharing, Katie. Alfred, what are your feelings on the journey so far?


Are you talking? Can't you see I'm busy? Some of us have work to do. Pipe down over there.

Wonderful! And our travels continue. Next stop: Minnesota! Weather.com says there's 100% chance of snow tonight, and the high for tomorrow is 33! I can't wait!

I was running!

I went jogging last night after work. 3 miles, it sucked. Actually the first half sucked, the second half was fine, and I felt great when I was done. I wasn't even sore this morning. Considering I haven't jogged in about a month, I thought I did pretty good. Also, I got heckled! A guy a few houses down from us started running next to me, telling me to pick up the pace. I told him I was fine, thanks, and he actually said "sorry, I'm just messing with you," and left me alone. Then I got honked at. Awesome. I was going to post a picture of Forrest Gump running and photoshop my head onto his body, but I don't have any good pictures of my head on this computer. Sorry. I know you're disappointed.

We leave for MN tomorrow! I'm super excited. I hope my liver is prepared for all the drinking we're going to be doing. A couple pictures of last year: the first one is of the boys doing a power hour. For some reason I was super nice and volunteered to be DD. Cathy missed this because she was home sick, I believe. The second picture is Mike and Tony diving in an aquarium, they got to go for free because they're military, so Alfred and I watched. It was fun watching, all the kids who were around got all excited to see the divers in the tank. They found a bunch of shark teeth. Oh yeah, they were in a tank with sharks. We'll miss Mike this year (stupid army), but Katie's coming along, which is nice - built in DD!

Our flight is at 12:30 tomorrow, we get back really late Monday night, and then my parents arrive for a week long visit on Friday. Action packed excitement up in these parts. So I'm not sure how much I'll be posting over the next several days, at least until next Tuesday, but I'll have my laptop with me. Try not to miss me too much! :)

house meeting #2

We met with the guy from the Army Corp this morning. The meeting went.... well, I think. We were there for about 1 1/2 hours, and the first hour or so was all negative. He's holding all the cards, we have to prove why we need to build on this lot, he doesn't have to say yes, we can't do it for reasons 1 2 3 and 4, blah blah, negative negative, he hates Florida. Didn't want to hear a thing we had to say. I was feeling very discouraged and was totally ready to just give it up. Then in the last 20-30 minutes he slowly starts to turn around. He goes through all these different types of information we would need to give to him, all these things we need to do and document, and then maybe he can give us a permit. Then he talks to our consultant about how much of an area will be impacted, we talk about some of the things we're doing to minimize how much will be impacted, and all of a sudden he says "well we could do a type x permit then." Our consultant just nodded and said "that's what we initially applied for." I guess it just took some time and a bunch of listening to himself talk for this guy to realize we weren't terrible people. Exactly what our consultant said he would do. He also said that once we do have all the things together that he needs, we can have a permit in as little as 3-4 weeks, provided everything is there and he can legally give us one. So we're tentatively optimistic. It was just very strange, we spend over an hour hearing how it can never be done, all doom and gloom, and then suddenly maybe we can do it after all.

Anyway, this would be the view as you come down the driveway, if we are in fact able to build this house:


Please note all the water. This is why there is such concern. However, this is only one little corner of the house site. Well, we're surrounded by swamp on three sides, but where the house will actually sit looks like this:


Some of it is technically wetlands, but not "nice" wetlands. We're hoping that between conserving all the surrounding swamp, and doing some things to minimize the amount of land we'd have to fill, they'll let us build this damn house. That would be nice. Cause driving 2-2.5+ hours a day sucks. And I want to have a baby. Have I mentioned that?

Embarrassing Photo Day

I was all set to whine about the crappy weather and other random whine-worthy items, but then I remembered that I brought my work laptop home this weekend and copied a bunch of pictures onto it. Yay for old embarrassing pictures! Unfortunately I didn't get started until 10 last night, which is my bedtime, so I didn't get too many. Anyway, today shall be Embarrassing Photo Day, Installment 1, Subject: Friends. I found this one from a 704 party.


It was the party in December 2001. Maybe you remember that party. Yes, this is the best picture of us from that night. There are definitely many pictures that I would not consider posting here. So I will post this one of myself looking stupid as a sign of goodwill.


What on earth was I thinking. Who knows where that thing had been. Good thing I didn't have any boobs, or I'd be popping out in this picture. (As a side note, it annoys me that whenever I lose some weight, my boobs are the first thing to go. Seriously, every ounce I lose is from my boobs. Why can't my ass shrink first and leave me a little something up top? I'm sure my brothers are enjoying this.)


Here we are enjoying some delicious hot dogs while looking like bums in NYC. This was New Years 2006. This picture cracks me up.

Alfred's graduation. Somehow we don't have any pictures of just the two of us from my graduation. Also, this could have been taken this morning and it would look about the same. Except my hair is a little longer right now. And I think Alfred has different glasses. There's a bunch of paint chipped off the ones he has now, so they could be the same and just look different, who knows. He's my friend, that why he's involved in Embarrassing Photo Day, Installment 1, Subject: Friends. He's going to fit into a lot of categories, I think. Lucky Alfred!

I seem to have run out of this variety of pictures. No more embarrassing ones, anyway. Stay tuned for later installments. For now I will leave you with some photoshop wizardry of another picture from New Years in NYC.

being productive

We woke up at 8 this morning (insanity) and proceeded to have a very productive morning/early afternoon. First we went to the farmer's market about 10 miles from us. We've never been there, and it's not as big as some other ones we've been to, but it was pretty nice. It was apparently Turtle Day so they had a bunch of stuff going on for that, some kids' activities, some guy singing, and a couple of tortoises that were apparently going to race. (Pokey kept hauling ass around his little area, trying to bust out. He found a gap in the fence, but alas, he couldn't fit through. Nona was just eating the grass like it was going out of style. Pokey also stuck his head in Nona's butt, causing the guy behind me to wonder aloud if that's how he got his name. What were tortoises doing at Turtle Day, anyway? But I digress.) There were lots of nice fresh veggies, and cheap too! Check out this haul, only $9.35 for all this. We're going to make stuffed peppers.
We got home by about 11, and for some reason I decided I was in the mood to do some yard work. I wasn't about to argue with myself, so out I went. Since we have so many trees in and around our yard, we have tons of branches and leaves and pine needles around all the time. So I blew off the roof, picked up the branches from the ground, and raked. Doesn't sound like that much now that I'm writing it out, but it took me a couple of hours. This is a vast improvement, believe it or not. You can see our neighbor's perfect yard in this picture, can you imagine how much he hates us? He's going to shit himself when he sees that we actually did some work out there.

house meeting #1

So when we met with the environmental consultant last night, he told us that he had heard from DEP (that's who we were waiting to hear from, not the county) and we ended up meeting them at the house site this morning. It went really well, I think. They seemed to think it wouldn't be a problem at all to approve building at the site, and that there's plenty of wetlands being preserved to make up for the little that we'd be filling. So that's good news. Let's hope the Army Corp guy agrees with them. Our consultant said he's never seen a response from the Army Corp like the one we got, it was a 4 page letter for filling 1/10th of an acre. Until the rules got changed last summer, that would have been automatically approved. Figures. We went over a bunch of stuff last night to talk about at our meeting with him though, so hopefully that will go well too. I should have taken a picture of the lot when we were there this morning so I'd have a picture to add to this post, but I didn't think of it. Alfred gets bored with picture-less posts. Sorry, Alfred.

In other news, I'm really enjoying the new tracking software I put on this page. The only problem is that it shows every time I look at my own page. (I'm apparently in East Palatka, by the way.) So now everyone can see how often I come see if anyone new has been here. Ah well, you all knew I was a dork anyway, right?

(Listen to this - in looking at our tax stuff, it turns out we paid more in interest on our mortgage than I earned all last year. Sad.)

new house

I know I've mentioned it briefly to some of you, but we have a meeting about it today so I figure I'll write about it. Several years ago, my in laws bought a chunk of land, sold off pieces of it to a builder, and built their own house on part of it. They still own several acres (I don't know exactly how much) but most of it is swamp, and hard to get to. There is one little piece that they have an easement to get to, but again, it's mostly swamp and not right on a road. Well several months ago Max or Alfred or someone decided to try to separate that piece and make it its own lot so that it could be sold and built on. Then that changed into us building on it. So that's what we're attempting to do. It's going to be a bit of a process, because before we can do anything we have to get permission to even build there. It's been legally separated from the rest of their property, and we had to apply to 2 different agencies to get a permit to build. The county has 30 days before they have to make a decision, so we're still waiting to hear from them. We heard from the Army Corp of Engineers (I think that's who it is, anyway) pretty quickly, and they said no in about 5 different ways. Apparently they think it's just a developer trying to wring every last cent out of the property. We have a meeting set with them next week to convince them that we're real people and will actually be living there. So we have a meeting this afternoon with the company who's helping us file all these applications to discuss the meeting next week. Should be fun. Hopefully it all goes well, because this whole hour commute thing sucks.

In other news, I ate a huge piece of cake and then had a piece of pie last night. Since then I've had an old Nickelodeon commercial for the Yogi Bear cartoon stuck in my head. It goes "Cakes, pies, cakes, pies, chicken thighs!" Then there's some music, and then "weekdays on Nick!" It's driving me crazy. I found this picture on a website for a Jellystone campground in Niagara Falls. I think we went camping there once. I think I talked to Boo Boo on the phone. I wonder if that actually happened.

dinner last night, and my link to terrorism

We got home late last night, after 8, and were unfortunately confronted with the mess we had left from Sunday (we spent the night at my in laws Monday night, which we do once a week to save on gas). Literally all I did last night was wash and put away dishes and eat dinner. But what a dinner it was! We had salmon with strawberry-mango salsa (made from our fresh organic strawberries, of course) with roasted asparagus. Healthy, fast, and yummy! We used to have this meal pretty regularly but I got kind of sick of it. It was really good last night though, I think the fresh salsa made the difference.


And now for the terrorism angle. I spent the summer after my junior year of college in DC with Alfred, he had graduated that year and was looking for a job there. I had been in Sweden the previous semester and hadn't bothered looking for a summer job. Luckily, while working at reunion weekend, I mentioned to one of the alumni whose address was in DC that I would be there for the summer and didn't have a job. Lo and behold, he worked at a law firm there and got me an interview. I ended up getting a job replacing a woman in HR who was out for maternity leave. It turns out that the guy from the reunion was Jamie Baker, aka James Baker IV, the son of James Baker III, aka the Secretary of State for the first George Bush. I did see Secretary Baker once (I was nowhere near important enough to actually meet him, I literally saw him through an open door), he was actually in the office for a couple days out of the eight or so weeks I worked there. Busy guy, apparently. It was a very cool place to work, the building was a block off the mall and had an open roof area with an amazing view.

Anyway, on NPR last night we were listening to an author who had written a book about bin Laden and his family. They invested money in American companies, blah blah, oh and who was the law firm that represented them in the US? Yup, the one I worked for. So I worked for the company who represented bin Laden's family (but not him) less than a year after 9/11. No, that doesn't really make me connected to terrorism in the slightest, but it's pretty neat anyway, I thought. Hell, I was just excited to hear the law firm's name on NPR! I worked somewhere (relatively) famous!

we're going to MN!

The big news of the day is: we bought tickets to go to Minnesota! Yay! It's about damn time! Last year we went up over Memorial Day weekend to visit when Mike was on leave and had a great time. We drank a lot. Played lots of Uno. So a couple months ago I emailed my siblings trying to figure out a weekend this spring that would work for all of us. Between Mike and Tony both having military things all the time, and us having such a lively social life (I think we had 2 whole weekends we were busy, we're in pretty high demand) it was really, really hard to pin down a weekend. I think there were 3 between February and May that worked. Eventually I had to admit defeat. So Alfred and Katie and I are flying up to visit in a couple weeks, and Mike is going another weekend. 3 out of 4 is better than nothing, I guess. And, bonus - since Katie will be there, we have a built in DD! Score! Plus, we're still planning on going to visit Mike in Hawaii this summer, so I guess that will have to do. This picture is from my last trip to Hawaii. Maybe this time we'll see more than the base, the hospital, and the ABC stores within a 2 block radius of our hotel. :)