Mostly due to this morning’s fucked up weirdness I went on an adventure I used to engage in almost every weekend, but have not done so for several months.

Which is to go shopping off Tol Eressëa, in the rest of Aman. What physical shopping I do, I love to do on Tol Eressëa. Everybody’s quite pleasant, in that small town kind of way, although I could imagine that going wrong. (Like if any of them ever read the PTSD parts of this blog and knew who I was.) Ever since Amazon.com launched Prime and gas prices went through the roof, I’ve kept my shopping excursions more or less purely on-island, buying online anything I couldn’t get otherwise.

Well, not today. I wanted, among other things, to get some nice media shelving for all my teas. Unfortunately what I got was almost every store being closed. This was somewhat pleasant in the end, because I ran into a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in ages, and we laughed and tried to find something open.

What we found was that everything not-a-restaurant was closed in Tol Eressëa, Formenos, and Tirion—and probably in Valmar too. There’s almost nothing in Alqualondë, except for a casino. Fuck you, Fëanor.

(Earlier I tweeted about finally reaching Valmar. I’d forgotten it was really Tirion I was in. See, I haven’t done this in a while, and I do get lost so easily that in the past it’s turned trips intended for Mandos to end up in Aramand. Aman: we’re not really great on the street/highway signs thing.)

However, we did discover Ungoliant-Mart was open.

I didn’t buy shelves from Ungoliant-Mart. But I did buy a GPS so I don’t get lost the next time I go to buy shelving from somewhere in Tirion. (It has a Target. Very fitting, somehow.)

Damn, GPS’s are cool. I got one that talks, but unfortunately it doesn’t have much in the way of voices (just three, and one of them doesn’t speak street names). I had some fun testing it out.

I wish I had taken pictures of the mountains. The Pelóri were beautiful earlier today, when there was actually sun.

And now I’m home and tired but better. Not much in the way of tea was drunk today, unfortunately.