big day

Today I learned that even with a bad laundry fume exposure this morning, I could still spend an entire hour wandering around inside the Tucson Convention Center, which today is all filled up with biking gear. El Tour de Tucson is tomorrow morning, so beside needing to register about 8000 riders, the organizers needed to make sure all the sponsors got a good shot at separating people from their money. We were there to try on a jersey. We didn't buy anything.

If you don't get out much, going into a place like that is pretty impressive. It's all corridors that look like, um, airport concourses without cranky travelers, and then when you get to the booths, they're in a room the size of Home Depot, but without all the formaldehyde. I did start to get kind of disoriented toward the end, but in general the air didn't seem too bad.

While jerseys were being considered, I wandered around and got:

1. a nylon drawstring bag that you can wear as a backpack from my car insurance company,
2. a magnet clip thingy for the refrigerator from the local heart care hospital (and I learned we have a local heart care hospital), and
3. a thing that looks like a green reflector with a clip and a button on the back from another hospital. If you hold down the button, a red LED flashes in the middle of the green reflector. I have no idea what this is good for.

My husband got something, too. The car insurance company gave him a buzzy little hand-held fan, which, the way it's been handled around here, has a cringe factor worthy of a three-inch (7.5 cm) mosquito.