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Saturday We woke up early, because a woman was supposed to come and give us a price quote to clean our floors and bathrooms (in-laws coming + paper due + alumni concert = I need help this time) at noon, and we wanted to do a little straightening up before she got here. (Because any human having their house cleaned by someone else is compelled to clean it first. I don't know why that is, it just is.) But she called around ten and said she was having car trouble, and we changed it to tomorrow. We were already up, though, and having had almost nine hours sleep, decided to remain up. We'd go out, run some errands - leave early and get home early. (Ha.) We had breakfast (well, at eleven-thirty, I had breakfast and he had lunch) and we showered and we sat around and read magazines and I answered alumni concert email and he made a CD and we got dressed and sorted the mail and finally left the house around 2:20. (The best laid plans.) A behemoth of a shopping center was our destination, and we reached it soon enough. Greg's had a cold the last few days - a bad one - and was a champion for agreeing to go shopping with me. I made a plan to get us home as quickly as possible, and it didn't end up too badly: 1. Target The order worked fine. It wasn't as quick as we would have liked, but then, I am female and we were in some of my favorite stores. What am I, stone? Target: I needed to exchange the outfit I bought for my member of our adopted family at work (ick. sentence structure). I bought the wrong size. Target is remarkably well-staffed for the holidays and the exchange was swift and painless. We wandered around some more, trying to think of something else to give his dad (who has very few interests and is very sedentary and is 70 and really doesn't want much) for Christmas, and bought cold medicine and Vicks VapoRub and a notepad shaped like a "P" for my mom's stocking and a little Polly Pocket doll for my cousin's daughter. Then we waited in line for a remarkably short time and moved on. Lowe's: This would have moved swiftly if I hadn't met a very chatty woman by the paint cards. I need to paint our downstairs powder room; I picked a color months ago and painted a test patch; I hate it and we've been living with a mostly-primed-with-one-Poet's Bloom-test-patch powder room ever since. The in-laws are coming, must. paint. So I'm there, picking out the new color, and the chatty woman just started talking to me about paint and it turns out that she lives one town over and she wants her guest room painted before Christmas and it's a fairly small room and someone quoted her $990 to paint it. $990! To paint one small room! I mean, I know I live smack in the middle of Overpriced World, but whoa! That's ridiculous. So she was chatty and I was delayed but I finally bought a new test can in a paler shade than what I'd tried before, and hopefully that will work. Best Buy: Greg was ready-ish when I got there, but of course I wanted to look too and he needed to buy blank CD-Rs and I bought the Vanessa Carlton CD because it was cheap and also a Nancy Drew CDRom game which looks a little hokey but fun and was marked down to $9.99. Best Buy has a nifty setup for the holidays - they've got their registers roped off so everyone waits in one long line and then gets whatever register is free when they get to the head of the line. So much better than having to play the "pick a lane, any lane" game which I always lose because the person in front of me always needs a price check or a rain check or a full body check. DSW Shoe Warehouse: Oh, how I love thee. But we were shopping for Greg, not me! Greg told me this morning that he needed to buy sneakers. This is amazing, because Greg thinks sneakers should be good for three years at a minimum even if you wear them practically every day, and I know he's had this pair for only a little over a year. (Apparently part of the sneaker wore through to plastic or something. Pain overrides thrift.) I had a $10 off coupon so we went and got him some very nice grayish-khakiish colored sneakers with blue accents that look fine with jeans, will look fine at the gym, and won't look quite as goofy as white ones when he insists on wearing them to the office with Dockers on non-teaching days. Sigh. I did successfully give the Members Only jacket to Goodwill, though, so I concede the sneakers-with-Dockers point (albeit begrudgingly) because they are, after all, his feet. Greg went to B&N while I trudged uselessly over to Party City, which had the ugliest holiday napkins I'd ever seen. I don't want to pay $20 for cloth holiday napkins; why aren't there nice paper ones? I've checked four places. I am bitter. I trudged bitterly back over to B&N and cheered myself up by reading the Buffy "Once More, With Feeling" script/sheet music/behind the scenes book while Greg read Film Comment. And then we left, and we stopped at the grocery store, and got home around six-thirty. Fajitas were the order for dinner, followed by a viewing of last night's Firefly and John Doe (we were out last night). Greg is watching Pulp Fiction, and I am writing here - until now, for I am done. Til tomorrow! |