So the way my brother, his wife, and I finally did get my car back down --- after a week of discovering I needed more than a couple days to adjust to the parking situation at the extruded office product with a car that's noticeably larger --- was the outlet-malls one. That is, they needed to do some miscellaneous shopping, and that's nearby, so they could come down with someone driving my car and meet up here, and we could go off to lunch and maybe walk around the mall together. So that's how Saturday ended up. My brother drove my car down and he announced that I must buy a new car, something driveable, soon. He advised me to wait a couple weeks until Chrysler goes bankrupt, then buy one (not the whole company, just one car).
The day walking the outlet mall mostly explained to me why I don't go to the outlet mall that much: if you're not into clothes or silly housewares there's not much there. I had forgotten the existence of the Disney Outlet Store, though, and as a result learned that my sister-in-law really likes these plush dinosaurs that she swears are not from Toy Story, against the opinion of me, her husband, and the labels on the plush dinosaurs. Also there's an Enchanted Light-Up Crown Cinderella in which you can cause parts of a Cinderella doll to light up just by ... well, it's supposed to be touching the jewels of her necklace. At that scale, the difference between that and touching her breasts is not obvious. My brother and I dared not try it because if we did, we'd end up put on a list.
We also learned at the Impractical Kitchen Wares store that it's all right if you hold up the things that are As Seen On TV and laugh at them because the store staff thinks they're ridiculous too. Well, a five shot-glass Ferris Wheel is a silly thing, but I feel like it's immature to laugh at something in front of people who do deserve a modest bit of dignity at their workplaces. That's even though those workplaces put out a lot of dips of various kinds and chips for people, and sell all sorts of constructs based on the premise that you aren't making enough popcorn.
Particularly captivating to my eyes was the popcorn maker designed to look vaguely like the tabletop juke boxes for a 1950s diner. You'd think something like that would be a CD player, but, no. They also have a vending machine-based drink cooler, a modest thing about half the size of a dorm room cubical mini-fridge where you press a button and get the soda cans out. What delighted me about this silly thing was that it contained a car adaptor, for people who want an impractically huge way of keeping their sodas cold and their batteries discharged.
Trivia: The 14 December 1807 fall of a meteorite in Weston, Connecticut, was pronounced credible by Yale University professors Benjamin Silliman and J L Kingsley. Source: Rain of Iron and Ice, John S Lewis.
Currently Reading: A Short History Of British Expansion, Volume 1, James A Williamson.