I bought my first messenger/laptop bag ~2011-06-21. According to my LJ, this decision arose because I didn't find a suitable gym bag at Target, when I started doing the gym thing. So I went with one of Target's cheap Embark house-brand messenger bags and repurposed my backpack as a gym bag. Alas, the cheap Embark house-brand bag's shoulder strap broke last week. It was coming apart at the seams, so, no big surprise. Oh, and Target has since ceased carrying them, but from pricing on similar limited-stock inventory I think it was around $20.

Moving on with te story though - last time I was at the AVDA thrift shop on SR 7/US 441, I noticed they had a whole playpen full of assorted bags, including laptop/brief/messenger type bags. So today I ducked in and picked up a nice sober black canvas American Tourister bag for $7. Nice change from the Embark's gray fabric with neon orange trim and shoddy decorative touches. The Tourister doesn't have a shoulder strap; not sure what to do about that, if anything. Maybe I'll duck in the Army-Navy store in the same strip mall as the thrift shop tomorrow and see if they have something suitable.

Previously I've only browsed and donated stuff to the thrift shop. Today I had my first real interaction with the staff. Only one of 3 clerks spoke enough English to tell me the price on a bicycle. Thirty bucks seems like a pretty nice price, but where am I going to put a bicycle?

tech nerd note: cleaned out Chrome's history, and Chrome started failing to load the designated startup page on a clean start. If I open a second window, that window loads Google SSL as expected. So I selectively disabled extensions until I found the culprit, which appears to be CAGE. Booo. My best guess is that CAGE's local data store/cache is corrupted somehow but I don't know where it would file such a thing.