mellicious | Entries tagged with shopping

I bought a book while I was at work tonight - a book about the history of bookstores in the U.S. Like I don't have enough reading material already. (However, the reason I saw this in the first place is because it was on a "Best books of 2024" list, so if you're interested: The Bookshop.) I'm sure I will read it before too long but I don't know that I'll read it right away.

I posted a list yesterday with all the books I bought in 2020, as part of a project that mostly has to do with getting rid of some of my paper journals. I wasn't keeping count, but it looked like I had read more than half of them, for sure, but that's a lot of unread books. I have a list with a lot of my unread books on it, somewhere, and I try to get myself to read from that list - and I do, some of the time.

As a matter of fact, I had some trade paperbacks of The History of the Lord of the Rings - a couple of big fat volumes of them, and they were old enough that one of them fell apart while I was reading it. (I'm guessing I'd had them since shortly after the movies came out, so probably 20 years or so!) - Are y'all familiar with this series? It's Tolkien's son Christopher doing a deep, deep dive into his dad's manuscripts. It's pretty fascinating. I actually read both of those this past summer and am almost finished with the third one - there are four in all. (Three books was not enough to cover the three volumes of LotR, apparently.) And there are more volumes for his dad's other works, too - I think it was a dozen total.

So I guess I kind of had Tolkien on the brain, and I happened to notice on Black Friday and over that weekend (which seems to have just become an extension of Black Friday, I assume I'm not the only one to notice that!) that, well, the Tolkien books were on sale. I don't think it was all of them, but it happened to be concentrated on some that I didn't have - The Children of Hurin, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Fall of Gondolin. That's what I bought. Oh, and one more volume of the History of Middle Earth (which is the full series title for the rest of those books I was talking about above). The one I got was the very last one, The Peoples of Middle-Earth. Hey, they were $1.99! (I've been happily reading about the Prologue to LotR, which for some reason is covered in that volume.)

And it's not like I had read all the Tolkien I had in the house, either. I know I have Lost Tales lurking somewhere, unread, and maybe some more. I kinda have a book-buying problem - not that that's anything new. (I'm sure a lot of y'all can sympathize.)

(But - progress in the unread department - I did finally read The Three-Body Problem this year!)

I signed up early for Holidailies because I happened to think of it, and then I almost forgot - well, actually, I did forget, since it's already after midnight - that December 1st is when I'm supposed to actually post something! Not that it's the end of the world to wait until 1am on the 2nd to post, but I'm just so flaky that I get aggravated with myself.

I started to say that I'm flaky "these days" but actually I've always been flaky - in particular, I don't have much of a sense of time, so unless I'm going to start setting alarms for myself constantly like one of my co-workers does, the flakiness is just going to happen. Plus well, y'know, we're all getting older, aren't we? All of us people who have been on the internet more or less since it existed, in particular. I am in denial about it, but I'm about to start looking at Medicare options - I turn 65 in the spring so I can sign up in a month or two, I think. Ugh. (Although I've also been griping about what I'm paying for my numerous prescriptions lately, so hopefully Medicare will be a bit cheaper in the end, assuming Trump doesn't go and cancel it.) (But I'm trying not to talk too much about the Orange One, it just raises my blood pressure. Speaking of medicine.)

We went to Moody Gardens in Galveston for Thanksgiving - they had a lovely buffet. It was expensive but I enjoyed it. I would never have thought of doing that, it was my brother-in-law's idea. Since we work in Galveston it seemed sort of silly to drive back down there on a day we're not working, but they picked us up and so it wasn't like it was actually any trouble.

I said I was trying not to shop this weekend and I did stay out of the mall (and Target, etc.) but I still ended up buying assorted stuff on the internet, of course. That's really my weakness, these days. I guess just the fact that I didn't go completely hog-wild makes it a win, though!

Oh, I am a Texas Ex so I feel like I'm contractually obligated (or something) to talk about the A&M game. Hey, Hook 'em Horns, and all that. I saw some Aggies say that we only won because all of the calls went our way, and that's actually true, but I don't think they unfairly went our way, just because both of our touchdowns weren't called that way in the first place. Now we have to play Georgia next week, that's our reward, and that didn't go so well the first time this year. We'll see.

We went to see Poor Things tonight, and wow, is that a batshit-crazy movie. (But we still liked it. We liked it kind of a lot, in fact.) It doesn't really seem to have gotten a lot of publicity unless you're somebody who looks at the award nominations. I do usually look at those, but I'm not sure if that's where I got the idea that it was something we might want to see. Actually I think I saw somewhere that it was a sort of a Lady-Frankenstein plot (with Emma Stone in that role) - which I knew would appeal to Rob - and also Willem Dafoe is in it and he's always fun. One thing you should know if you're going to see it is that it's definitely an R-rated movie - not one to take the kids to. It's a HARD R. There's nudity and a hella lot of simulated sex, and it's pretty violent off and on as well. (Genre-wise, Rob and I agreed that we'd call it sort of a horror-comedy, although it's hard to pin down. It's not at all scary.)

So, I have to work the next two days, which I'm not super-happy about, but it's a short shift (like, 5 hours) so I can't complain too much. And we have to go car shopping at some point - I'm getting a new (used) car, finally! I don't know that I've mentioned this but Rob and I have been ride-sharing for several months, because my poor Toyota has 178,000 miles on it and I finally got where I was afraid to drive it around by myself at night - and since we work the evening shift that's kind of a deal-breaker. The ride-sharing worked well enough that we haven't had serious problems with it, but sooner or later there's going to be a point when we must be at different places at the same time, so car-shopping it is. We went to the credit union Tuesday and got a pre-approval so we're all set, we just have to decide on a car.

I'm writing this at work. It's slow. There are people here but nothing's going on that requires my attention, at least for the moment. We close at 9 on Fridays so it'll be time to start closing up before I know it.

Writing is a less expensive way to pass the time than what I was doing before, which was browsing Etsy. I bought a beaded bracelet and $40 worth of candles before I knew it. Oh well, I missed the Bath & Body Works sale that they always have in early December (it was today, but everything online was sold out before I thought to check), and I'm sure I would have spent at least as much there if I had had the chance. And hey, on Etsy you're (presumably) buying from a small seller, so that's good. (For the record, I bought the candles from From the Page, which as you might guess is book-themed.)

I was late to work because the traffic stopped dead about half a mile from my house and stayed that way for darn near 15 minutes. By the time it finally got moving whatever the problem was had been solved, apparently - that is to say there was no wreck to be gawked at or anything. But that kind of thing is pretty unusual in my little suburb. Getting to work involves getting on the freeway, for me, but by the time I finally got to the freeway the traffic there was problem-free.

My sister is sending me text updates on the progress of the unpacking. She says she's totally exhausted at the end of the day each day but she's also enjoying the process. I guess we're going to try to go check in person this weekend at some point.

Hope you're having a good day celebrating or staying in or whatever you're doing today. (We talked about going to the movies - which is why I put the Wonder Woman icon up - but we decided to wait. Maybe tomorrow. The WW84 reviews are decent but I'm not expecting anything as good as the first one.)

It occurs to me that this is my Covet anniversary. It's a game I've been playing for two years today - a fashion game, of all things. Part of me doesn't like to think I'm girly enough to play things like that, but clearly I am. I definitely would never have started playing it on my own, though, or even thought about the existence of such a thing. The reason I know I started playing on Christmas Day was that my sister was playing it and she showed it to me and encouraged me to try it, on Christmas afternoon when we were bored. (We had dinner reservations so we were basically just waiting around for it to be dinner time!) We were both playing for a month or two, but she slacked off on it eventually and I didn't. It's the gamer in me, maybe! I'm now level 69 and this is not a game where you level easily. It's fun, though, I always describe it as dressing paper dolls, although I guess I'm aging myself by saying that. The scoring is on the value of your closet, which is kind of comical to me. You dress your dolls and the scoring is at least partly by other players' voting, although I think it's also partly an algorithm. And you get prizes (more clothing to dress your dolls in!) according to how good your score is. Like I say, I would never have thought to play this on my own - I am not a person who dresses fashionably in real life - I like to be comfortable too much. But I have a little fashion habit (if you've ever looked at my Pinterest boards, you probably know this already) where I just like to look at clothes. So I guess it's an outlet for that. But however it happens, apparently I'm pretty good at it.

ADDED: I was trying to post a picture here and I can't get it to work, so I posted it on my little Covet blog that I've never done much with - so that's here. (It's my perfect score that I got the other day.)

My goal today is to write something coherent and with slightly fewer parentheses than yesterday. Realistic goals, that's the ticket.

I have been really planner-obsessed this year, so maybe I will talk about that. I've used some kind of planner off and on for years. I still have a couple of little coil-bound books that I used in college around somewhere, and after that I used actual planners sometimes and other times I just kept a little calendar in my purse and scribbled on that. When I used to be a secretary, we used Franklin Planners, so that's probably where my current planner obsession started.

The last five years or so I've used an Erin Condren planner. I used the Lifeplanner, the big coil-bound weekly planner. (With much nicer coils than those old ones!) And I liked it, but somewhere along the line I started looking at Happy Planners. I bought a Lifeplanner for 2020 late in 2019, but somewhere around the beginning of this year, I started experimenting around with things that were marked down on Happy Planner's website.

And boy, did I experiment. I won't say I tried every format HP has, because they have a bunch, but I tried several. The first thing I bought was a horizontal planner, which I really liked - but I use it as a journal, not as a planner. I ended up with more than one of these because I use one for talking about books and one for everything else.

Then I tried a mini planner. It turned out to be entirely TOO mini for my taste, as a planner, but it's okay for just, like, note-taking. That one was a vertical planner, so later I tried the bigger vertical one (they call it "classic") which is almost the same size as a regular Erin Condren, and so, unsurprisingly, I liked that one fine. I was determined to use up my Lifeplanner for this year, because they're expensive, so I'm kind of in the middle of transitioning between brands.

Not entirely, though. I bought a little EC "Petite Planner" just to try it out - it's a daily planner, and it turned out I really like using it to scribble in at work. So I'm still buying those, for now. Before that I tried the HP "skinny classic" - so called because the pages are the size of a regular classic page cut in half vertically - and it worked ok for work, but I always ran out of room and ended up taking notes on random pieces of paper that I then promptly lost.

So the experimenting paid off in the end, and hopefully I'm set for planners for a good while, now. What I do really love about Happy Planners is that they're loose-leaf. Very versatile. And when I'm not trying every format they produce, they're cheaper.

People look at planners and say, "Oh, you must be so organized!" But really I'm massively DISorganized and that's why I need a planner so much. That's my theory, that if you're really a naturally organized person you can do without a planner. My planner is just my brain on paper.

(And don't tell me I should go digital. I like the act of writing it down, it seems to help somehow.)

I apparently haven't posted here since that week I stayed home sick back in March. Man, that seems like eons ago. Usually I think time goes whooshing by incredibly fast, but pandemic time seems to have changed that. The first couple of months, especially, seemed to crawl by. I've heard other people say that too, but I wasn't even cooped up at home all the time, so I found it a bit surprising. (I'm sure I said some of this way back when, but I'll repeat it since I'm sure not everybody remembers what I said months ago!)

Our workplace closed for two months. Our immediate workplace, that is - but since we work for an academic medical center we are automatically "essential" employees. I ended up working something similar to my normal part time hours, in the mostly-empty building with maybe three to six other people, doing spreadsheets and later working on setting our software up to do what we needed to do for the way we are running now that we're open again. Rob ended up working in the hospital on the mainland, screening people coming in and out of the building. He did it for, like seven weeks. He kind of enjoyed it for a while, as a change of pace, but I think by the end he was totally ready to come back.

So for those of you who don't know this already, where we work is a gym. We had to shut down because it was in the orders the governor gave for the initial shut-down, in the middle of March. In May Texas started opening up again, and we got the go-ahead to open in mid-May. Normally we are open 7 days a week, about 360 days a year, from very early in the morning until late at night. (In the old world I think we were only closed about 6 hours in the middle of the night, at least on weeknights.) In the new world, we still open very early in the morning, but we close earlier at night, and we're not open at all on weekends. The first couple of weeks we were at 25% capacity and then we went up to 50%. We doubled up on housekeepers and so far so good. We work on a reservation system, which was the thing that I mentioned that I worked on setting up. People complain about it a lot - I complain about it a lot - but it does work. And there's no Covid running rampant here like there's supposed to be in Houston. There are cases, but they're pretty scattered.

Life is kind of gradually seeming more normal. Normal, except with masks, I guess? We go out to eat once in a while - cautiously. We go in stores occasionally - but I've always bought a lot of stuff online anyway. (My Amazon profile says I've been buying stuff there since 1999.)

Rob is buying a new car. And my sister came down here last week and bought a house, no less! In our old home-town, which is pretty close to me, and that's what seemed to have been her motivation. (She bullied her husband into it somehow.)

I put the UT icon on this post because I heard this week that both UT and A&M are going to try to play football. I don't see how you can do socially distant football, but I guess we'll find out.

I mentioned yesterday that I was feeling a little sick. Well, we are both sick - pretty mildly sick, I think it's just a cold - and furthermore, my sister and her husband are too. So I guess maybe somebody that waited on us earlier this week was sick, because meals were mostly when all four of us were together. (I believe one server on Christmas Eve mentioned that they were sending her home because she was sick, in fact.) But anyway, I'd rather have a cold than a severe allergy attack, because the cold will go away in a few days. With allergies you just don't know.

Rob went off to see the Halloween movie at the dollar theater. I just stayed home. I'm watching the MSNBC shows from earlier today (what the heck is the stock market doing?) and futzing around on the computer. I bought two more candles from Bath & Body Works (I always want to say Bed Bath & Beyond, but that's wrong) because they have the 3-wick candles on half-price sale again. I bought another Fresh Balsam candle and a non-holiday one that was Eucalyptus Mint or something like that. I thought that sounded like it was pretty safely something I would like.

I'm obsessing about Zoya polishes at the moment - not the new ones, but the old ones - like, the ones so old you can't figure out all the information on them. I suppose this is a stupid thing to obsess about, but I am just the same. (I have this spreadsheet with a lot of holes in it and I was trying to figure out some of the missing ones. I have names and Zoya's polish numbers and I'm trying to match those up, basically.)

Last night I finished the book that I was reading - one of the series that I didn't get around to talking about earlier, the October Daye books - one of Seanan McGuire's urban fantasy series - so then I had to decide what was next. I have unread stuff that I could have read without spending more money, but I really wanted to either get the next book in that series or the next Expanse book. That was book 9 of 12 on the October Daye books and I've only read the first Expanse book (Leviathan Wakes) - there are a bunch of those too, at least 8 of them, I think, from what I saw when I looked on Amazon. I like both series and I'm not in any particular hurry to finish one or the other. If the October Daye books seemed to be heading towards some particular ending, I would probably be wanting to finish, but as far as I can tell, they're mostly just serials and could possibly go on forever. I'm not far enough into the Expanse series to have any idea about that - it did have an ending to the first book, they're not just cliffhangers like, say, Lord of the Rings, where it's really just one book divided up. But there's plenty of plot to go on with, too. Anyway, I bought the second Expanse book, which is Caliban's War. It seems to pick up maybe a couple of months after the first one ends, from what I've read so far.

We actually went to the mall tonight. Rob was off and I needed to return something to Sephora (or pack it up to return by mail, which would have been even worse), so we went. I figure if you're going to go to a shopping mall in December, Monday is usually your best bet. And it wasn't bad. The mall near us is usually pretty crowded, but we found a parking place right near the front of Dillard's, and then walked down to Sephora. Sephora wasn't mobbed either. It took a while for me and the clerk to get the return figured out, but we got that done eventually, and then we walked around the mall in a big loop, the way we used to do years ago. Rob saw something shiny in the window of Hot Topic that pulled him in - honestly I don't think I'd ever been inside the physical store, although I did buy a limited edition Funko from them online a few years ago. Rob didn't end up buying anything, but I decided to buy some nail polish since I always liked those skull bottles they have - they were buy one get one free so I got two. I'll swatch them and I might even wear them at some point but really I just bought them to sit around on the top of my little acrylic cabinet and look cool. Both of them together only cost about half of what one of the NailsInc polishes I had just returned did.

So we farted around the mall for a while longer - we went in Paper Source, we looked at the stuff in the window of the Lego store, as one does - and then we went across the freeway to Fuddruckers and had hamburgers for dinner. You can't even really say that we were holiday shopping because we didn't buy any gifts. We've bought what we euphemistically refer to as "our presents to each other"** already, and we're having an atypical Christmas this year - I'll get around to talking about that later, I'm sure - and I'm not really sure I actually need to buy anybody anything at all. (I have my usual assortment of leftovers from mystery boxes and stuff that I will give to somebody - that will probably get divided between several people as usual. But I don't really have to worry about some of the other stuff I usually do, this time.)

**Regarding the above-mentioned presents to each other that we actually buy ourselves:
His - a new leather jacket. He picks these out, always because he's very picky about them (although after all these years I probably could make a pretty good guess at it). He buys about one a decade - or actually not even that often, because he's only starting on his third one and we've been married for thirty years. I think we'd been married a couple of years before he got the first one, but we discussed this and neither one of us really remembers clearly where we got the first one, much less when, exactly - although we decided eventually that it must have come from JCPenney. (And actually he sold that first one for almost as much as he paid for it, that was maybe in the early 00s. It had cat scritches on it but the person who bought it wanted it anyway.) The second one came from Target of all places, and it certainly isn't in any shape to sell 15 years or so in - the lining is all torn out, etc. I told Rob to put it in the hall closet for emergency back-up. Anyway, he how has a third one which he is very happy with and is already wearing so there's certainly no use in pretending to unwrap it on the 25th.
Mine - nail polish, of course. All that stuff I've been going on about on the nail blog lately? That's my present. (I haven't even posted swatches for it all yet, much less worn it. I really need to slow my nail-polish purchases down so I can at least wear most of it before I buy more!)

(If you've noticed what I titled this - I thought "holiday horrors" sounded funny but nothing here is really horrible except maybe the amount that I spent on nail polish - which I haven't added up because I don't actually want to know the answer. But I'm leaving the title anyway because it amuses me.)

I believe I used the phrase "up in the air" regarding our holiday plans before, and well, now they're really up in the air, because barring weather problems, Rob is going to be in Ohio on Christmas morning, and is coming back home later that day. Rob's mom is apparently sliding downhill fast (she has Alzheimer's) and Rob's brother is worried about it enough that he thinks Rob should make another trip up. So he's going on the 20th and coming back on the 25th. We made the reservations tonight and the plane fares really weren't as outrageous as I was afraid they might be. I'm not sure how much of an emergency it really is but if it was my mom, I wouldn't want to take chances with that. It works out pretty well because he only has to take a couple of days off work, and then he's still got the whole week off after that to be on holiday. I can still do... whatever it is we end up doing with my side of the family, and I don't kid myself that Rob is going to care that much about missing that. And then I can go pick him up on Christmas night.

(We had a string of years starting in 1999 when my uncle was in the hospital over Christmas, and ending, I guess, in 2006 before my mother died, where just about every holiday season got disrupted by somebody's serious illness. That's why I wrote that in the title. But, y'know, there's not much to be done about that.)

So Rob was off today and I had a doctor's appointment, and I started to offer to change the appointment, and then I realized that the doctor's office is right by our favorite little Chinese restaurant, and so instead I kept my appointment and Rob met me at the restaurant afterwards. And then we actually went to the mall, which we hardly ever do, especially in December when it's so crowded. We figured a Monday would be the least-crowded you could get this time of year, and I think that was true, in that we actually were able to find a decent parking space, but it was still pretty crowded. We picked the end away from the brand-new wing, but there were still lots of people around. (The new two-level parking garage was already open, which probably helped with the parking. I had had some vague idea that it wasn't finished yet.) We wandered through H&M and into Sephora, and a friendly Sephora employee saw us looking at Nest perfumes and showed me the last remaining Black Friday Nest gift set, which was three small rollerballs of three different Nest fragrances for $10. I snapped it up without even worrying about which fragrances were in it, because if I don't want them for myself, I can always use them for stocking stuffers.

But that was the only thing we bought other than coffee. We browsed Yankee Candle and Bath & Body Works and I heroically refrained from buying any more candles, which are always one of my weaknesses. I do want to see the new expansion eventually, but I can stand to wait til the holiday rush is over for that, and we didn't venture down that far today. It was a big mall already, even before this last expansion. (They were building this mall when I was in high school. I could pretty much name you the expansions and the changes in the major tenants over the years. It started with Joske's, Montgomery Ward, and Sears - Sears is the only one still there. Joske's got bought up by Dillard's, and M.Ward went bankrupt, what, years ago now.)

Huh, well, apparently the Galveston (County) Buc-ee's that's currently under construction is not going to be the biggest one ever. Darn. Well, we just went in the brand-new Waller location this afternoon, and I think a little smaller might actually be better. It was a LONG way (from the side door where we came in) to the restrooms. I assume that this newer one is not going to actually be small by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm sure it'll be plenty big to suit me.

Buc-ee's is a thing in Texas. I wasn't sure, but looking at their website, apparently they are still confined to Texas. They started out as just normal convenience stores that were maybe a little on the large side. They were in mostly rural areas around here - the first one I ever remember seeing was at Highway 646 and Highway 3, which is in League City nowadays, and maybe it always was, technically, but 20 years ago was totally the middle of nowhere. I'm not sure if that Buc-ees is still there - I guess it is. I also remember seeing one down around Brazosport, which actually could have been the original one, or one of the original ones, because apparently they started in Lake Jackson, and that's another one of those areas where the city limits are amorphous - Lake Jackson/Freeport, which is down across San Luis Pass, just south of Galveston. (Big Bang Theory fans may know that that's where Sheldon is said to be from.)

Anyway, we went in the Cypress location yesterday - which is smallish, by Buc-ee's standards - and got fudge, because I've had it before and knew it was really good. (Buy 4 chunks, get 2 free - the chunks are about a quarter pound, I was told, and they're 3.50, so you end up with a pound and a half for $14 and change, which is not cheap, but heck, it was Christmas Eve.) I also got gas - I've already forgotten how much the gas was, exactly, but it was pretty reasonable. Then we got about 15 or 20 miles down the road and found the new one in Waller, that they have built since we last came through there last year. We didn't stop there yesterday, but today on the way back, it happened to fall about right coming home from Bryan, since I'd had a lot of tea at lunch, and after about an hour of driving, I was absolutely ready for a bathroom break. So we took care of that at the giant Waller store, and I bought more tea to go in my refillable mug that I bought yesterday (I think it was $3.99, if you want to know, and refills are 99 cents), and Rob got a Coke, and we poked around the t-shirts and such a bit on the way out, too. Want a Duck Commander shirt? Buc-ee's has lots.

(I don't even know what Duck Commander is. I assume it's different from Duck Dynasty, right?)

I had the most lovely dream about my mother the other day, that's kind of stuck with me. Half the time when I dream about my mother she's fussing at me, in that way that mothers do. But this was a dream about wandering around a museum. I think she just kind of turned up halfway through it, and we wandered around the museum and then went shopping. My mom was always big on shopping, and we did a lot of that, in real life. And we also did a lot of touristy things like museums. And this dream was kind of the best of that, and it was kind of holiday-themed, too, like there were Christmas lights everywhere. Really that was the best of my relationship with my mother, right there.

I've been kind of slacking on Holidailies. Actually I've been slacking on the holidays in general. I've got to do something about Christmas cards. I should probably do that tomorrow, because I don't have the work computer so I have sort of an unexpected day off. I should probably take advantage of that while I can! Other than cards, I'm basically ok on Christmas - I have the gifts I need to get and so forth. I talked to my aunt today and we're all set on the family stuff, so it's just cards that are an issue. We'll see what I manage to get done tomorrow.

(Also, if you're interested, you can hear all about my big box of nail polish that I got in the mail today!)

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holidailies.org

I had something-or-other (other than this) that I was intending to talk about, and of course now I've forgotten what it was. Middle-age is hell. Oh well, it'll come back to me eventually.

We went to the outlet stores today, more just to see what's there than intending to do our holiday shopping, but actually we managed to get a good bit of it done anyway. Rob needed a new wallet, and we had been looking at some pretty expensive ones online, and we looked at a bunch at the Fossil store at the mall when we were there a couple of weeks ago. (Don't get the impression from this that either one of us spend a lot of time shopping - I used to love to shop, but these days I've lost interest to a great extent, and I haven't been in a mall in a couple of years, I think.) Anyway, Rob decided he didn't like the looks of the Fossil wallets at the outlet store, for some reason, but we poked around and eventually found one he liked at Perry Ellis, for less than $20. (The ones we had been looking at before were, like, $40-75.) So he's getting a new wallet and he's happy with that, but it was so inexpensive that now I have to think of something else I can get him for Christmas. I'll manage, though.

We've done our Christmas gifts this way for so long that I forget that it's not the way other people do it, but basically, we pick out our own Christmas gifts. He picked out his own wallet, because he's picky about them. Typically over the years, his gifts have primarily been books and movies, and he tells me a bunch of things he's interested in and I go order them on Amazon, mostly. He's into horror movies and stuff like that, and I wouldn't be able to pick the right things out on my own. I know some of the things he wants, but he always manages to come up with at least one or two that I never would have thought of. And well, I am equally picky about what I want. Usually he buys me a couple of surprises and I buy him a couple, too, but the bulk of the money is spent on the stuff that we have picked out ourselves. Is that weird? I think it started because we were poor and didn't want to waste money on things we didn't want. But we've been married so long now that I barely remember.

(Actually, it occurs to me that I'm saying I didn't want to pick out a wallet for him because he's picky about them, and it's true, but actually I picked out the last one, the one that he loved and which held up for more than five years. It was from Levenger and I bought it on clearance for maybe about what we paid for this one, $20 or so. But I think I got lucky on that one.)

(Also, I already talked some about my own gifts and other shopping issues on the nail blog, so I'm not going to repeat myself. But it's safe to say I'm mostly getting nail polish for Christmas.)

The other thing we bought was some stuff at the Disney Outlet, for some small relatives. Princess dolls and cars, about what you would imagine.

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Presented without comment: A girl - young, but not a kid, maybe 18 or so - asked me in the store today where to find the onions. "Um, I imagine up front with the vegetables," I said (thinking that it's possible she might be talking about minced onions or something like that). "Oh ok - I've been all over the store," she said, and turned around and went toward the produce section.

(Note that I WOULD comment, but I can't really think of anything funny and/or clever, or even just particularly interesting, to say about it. So I'll let it stand on its own.)

But now I am looking at Wikipedia trying to decide if onions are actually a vegetable or not. I think not, but I don't see that that (long) article says so one way or the other. (Although it does mention "vegetables" at one point rather than "other vegetables" so I suppose that's a clue.) Genus Allium, I knew that part, and allium is a flowering plant, so I guess... not a vegetable? Feel free to weigh in!

Aaand... in that way that tends to happen with Wikipedia, I went from the onion article to the one about Asparagales. That's an order name I haven't heard before; I think back a few years ago when I got on my big plant-cultivating kick, they were still putting onions in Liliales. So that's interesting - to me at least!

By "the store" I mean Wal-Mart, as it happens - not where I usually buy my groceries or where I shop often at all, these days. But I needed paper and that was the closest place I could think of that was likely to sell it to me at a not-utterly-ridiculous price. And come to think of it, given that, I hope the poor girl didn't mean "all over the store" literally - I was just imagining her looking in, y'know, the bread aisle or something, not hardware. That would be very sad.

(Yeah, ok, so that may be a comment after all. Hush.)

(And come to think of it, why have I never considered the topic of onions/vegetables before? Whether tomatoes are a vegetable comes up all the time (no) - so why does nobody ever mention onions?)

I mentioned back before Thanksgiving that I had volunteered to drive Anthea (aka

antheap ) to Austin. That has now formally fallen through, which is a bit of a relief because the logistics were rather complicated. Only the other hand I am sorry, too, because I love hanging around with her and I always love an excuse to go to Austin. She does report that she expects to be back in May for a conference, so maybe we'll be able to try again then.

I did get to hang out with her for a couple of hours tonight, though. We had talked about making a ~~pilgrimage~~visit to Sephora, because we both really enjoyed that when we went before, but before we got around to it, she mentioned in passing that she was looking for a certain kind of salt (which I misheard as "sauce" for quite some time) so I had the bright idea of going to Central Market. Actually, first we tried to go to the University Co-op - because it's right down the street from her Houston workplace and I thought it would be entertaining - but we couldn't even find a parking place at Uptown Park where the store is, so we had to abandon that idea. I suspect that she would have been highly amused by it, but I guess we will never know (unless of course we go to Austin and I can drag her into the real one on the Drag, which would be even better). I don't know what was going on at Uptown Park, but whatever it was, seemingly everybody was there. But Central Market worked out quite well, even though we didn't find the item she was looking for. Anth and I sort of have the same sort of "ooh! shiny!" attitude towards shopping, which I guess is why we always end up shopping when she comes. Anyway, she seemed to really enjoy it (Central Market, I mean), and I always do, too. And as I always do, I came out with pomegranates (photographic evidence!) and sourdough bread and pie and other such odds and ends. Never fails.

After that we went across the street to Highland Village and went in a couple of places - PaperSource was a big hit. (Anth bought several of the items on this page. Well, or maybe just this one. Plus Jesus and his Magnetic Wardrobe, which does not seem to be there although several other versions are.) And we also went into Williams-Sonoma and sampled the peppermint bark. And then everything was closing and that was all the shopping we could do, darnit.

(There were tons of parking places at Central Market and even at Highland, which can sometimes be crowded. I have no idea what was going on at that other shopping center, but apparently it was the hot place to be.)

(I am listening to the Nerdist podcast with Matt Smith, which I know many of you will already know about, but it's very entertaining. Just thought I'd mention it.)

I got Twitter-mocked a bit yesterday for saying that going to Ikea puts me in the holiday spirit, but it sorta does, ok? Don't judge. Possibly it's true that practically any shopping at all does the same thing - but anyway, I did go to Ikea. I didn't buy much that had anything to do with Christmas, but still, Ikea has cute holiday stuff and it did sort of help put me in the mood.

It occurs to me that some people may think of Ikea differently than I do - i.e., you may think of it as a furniture store. And while I do buy furniture there from time to time, it's the non-furniture part of Ikea that I'm fond of. I think of it more as a really big housewares store, I guess you'd say. I came out of there today with batteries and spoons (for some reason we're always short on spoons) and toys - and frozen meatballs, because I love those darn things, and a couple of other things that I don't recall right now. (Also, Tuesday is apparently a good day to go to Ikea, because they were as close to not being busy as the Houston Ikea ever gets - meaning, near as I could tell, that there were several hundred people there instead of the usual several thousand.)

Let's see, we had a nice Thanksgiving but I don't have all that much to say about it. Nobody got on anybody's nerves to speak of, or got into a fight or anything, and that's what usually makes for a more memorable day, let's face it, so it's a good thing when it's not memorable. I love my relatives, but it's a pretty rare holiday when nobody's fighting.

I'm signed up for the new-version Holidailies, so I should be posting regularly in December. That doesn't start officially until next week, though. (And like last year, I'm going to be in Dallas the day it starts, so whether I'll actually be able to post that day is iffy.)

Hobby Airport, Houston, Monday morning
I parked in the main airport lot just because it's easy and not all that expensive, so I didn't have to ride a van, but I noticed on the way in that the Parking Spot vans have changed their color scheme - they've always been painted with spots, as long as I remember them being around, but the ones here are now maroon with white spots, and they say "Proud Partner of Texas A&M Athletics." Ah, yet another moving billboard. At least it's a mildly amusing one, I guess.

It's 9:45 or so - my plane's at 11 - and I am sitting inside the security perimeter eating a breakfast burrito. I didn't leave the house until 8:50. I forget how conveniently near the airport we live nowadays. I went the "back way" (meaning west up 518 to Hwy 35 rather than east to the freeway) and it took 20 minutes flat. I think the other way is about the same, normally, but I was worried about rush hour traffic on the freeway. No rush hour to speak of in Pearland and on Telephone Road!

Security pulled out the man right in front of me and a teenage girl behind me for further searches, but I don't think either of them was a purely random search. The guy set the alarm off on the walkthrough and they seemed to have seen something in the girl's (pink) duffle bag that they didn't like. I am always tempted to hang around and see how these things turn out but I guess that would be considered odd, huh?

( Continued over here )

You gotta watch out for those Canadians. (via

iainpj )

(This was written yesterday - I'm telling you that so I don't have to fix all the references to what day it is!)

We just got back from a field trip to Target and Office Depot. Amazingly, I spent more at OD than I did at Target. (Usually I walk in the door at Target and $60 or so is gone. Boom.) That was mostly because I bought printer ink, though. I am still printing out those pdf's for class so I'm still going through black ink like crazy. All we got at Target was a few things we actually needed, like PowerBars and trash bags, and some Halloween paper goods - paper towels and napkins - because I am a sucker for such things and Target always has them this time of year to enable me with. (With Skelanimals on them, this year! I may die from the cute.) (Also, I'm really embarrassed to admit that I like anything you can buy at Hot Topic, as is apparently the case with Skelanimals, but there it is. It's really not the first time that's happened, either, to tell you the truth.)

Speaking of Halloween, the skull necklace is finished, I'm pretty sure for real this time:
( Another necklace picture... )

I'm eating leftover pesto pasta from yesterday - we took Art out to dinner for his birthday (which was last week, but he has children who actually expect to see him on his birthday and everything) and he always wants to go to the same Italian place so he can have his baked ziti. Since it's also my favorite Italian place and maybe Rob's 2nd favorite or something - he thinks their marinara sauce is a bit too sweet - we had no objection whatsoever to that. (I did not, however, order the World's Best Calzone, because I've actually lost a tiny bit of weight and I'd like to continue that. The pesto pasta is not exactly terribly low-cal but I figured it was better than the calzone there.) (I didn't think of this at the time I ordered it, but that pesto pasta was also my mother's favorite entree - I took it to her in the rehab hospital a couple of times, even - and yesterday, as it happens, was also my mother's birthday.) I didn't ask Art how old he is, and I have trouble keeping track, but I think he's 87.

I am in the middle of printing a 73-page PDF, which is the reading assignment for module 4 of my class. I finished module 2 yesterday and got started on module 3. I am mostly finished with it, except that I haven't actually taken the test yet - I've already taken an Ambien, just now, so I think it would be best to wait until later for that. I hope the 73 pages are interesting, at least. They are about diagnosis codes, which interests me in theory, at least. Did you know that diagnosis codes (the official name is ICD-9, for International Classification of Diseases, 9th edition) were developed by the World Health Organization to track mortality statistics? They are used these days for morbidity (disease) as well, but cause of death was where they started.

Anyway, my class has no pre-printed textbook, it is all PDFs. Luckily I have figured out how to do front-and-back printing on my printer and it's not too terribly time-consuming. I'm just eating up ink like crazy, that's all.

So one of our assignments is to make up multiple-choice test questions for the other students to answer. (Some people canNOT write a decent test question to save their lives but that is another topic.) Here's one of the two I made up. I was rather proud of myself for coming up with several perfectly reasonable alternate answers for this.

The abbreviation "US" in a medical record is most likely to mean:
A. United States
B. Urine sample
C. Ultrasound
D. Under sedation

The correct answer, per the textbook, is C. I phrased the question rather carefully since really the answers would all be perfectly legit as far as I'm concerned.

In other news, I have decided I need to record what catalogs come in the mail. It's that time of year.
Today's haul:
Levenger (a dangerous one, that - I have a thing for leather goods)
Woman Within (which is what used to be Lane Bryant)
Land's End Men
another Land's End which is unspecified but which seems to mostly be women's clothes
Connecting Threads (quilt fabric)
The Land of Nod

That last one annoys me somewhat - I ordered some gifts from them ONCE, a couple of years ago, and they won't go away. I occasionally want to scream, "I don't have children! I don't have grandchildren!" at them until they give up on me. On the other hand, I do end up perusing the things from time to time; they have some cute stuff.

Yesterday I got a Crate and Barrel Best Buys catalog, always one of my favorites. It made me contemplate a trip into Houston to go to the big C&B "uptown". But that's probably best saved until closer to Christmas.

Alright, my printing is finished, I am going to bed.

My monitor finally died, so I have a new 20" Acer widescreen. I am pouting slightly because it doesn't seem near as big as the old one (which was a 22" Samsung) but on the other hand it only cost $99, and we had several small gift cards that we used so it only came out $72 in the end. To replace the Samsung would have been $299, which is ridiculous so I decided I could bear to sacrifice the size. The picture quality seems fine.

We went up to Houston this afternoon expressly to go to the Half-Price Books on Montrose, because I wanted more Aubrey-Maturin books and I knew they had them - or they did a couple of weeks ago, at least! They were having a 20% off sale for Memorial Day, too. We came out of there with two more of the A-M books and assorted other stuff, and only $35 or so the worse for wear, which isn't too bad. (I restrained myself once again from buying the hardback Lord of the Rings set that they have, although I was sorely tempted.)

(Note to Col, because we were discussing it: there are apparently at least 16 of the Aubrey-Maturin books, because the Norton trade pback editions are numbered and that was the highest number I saw.)

I posted some more odds and ends of cameraphone pictures on Flickr, including a picture of our balcony and some blurry-but-interesting ones from the wedding, and also a couple I found forgotten on the phone that I took of the Astrodome in January. The camera-phone takes pretty good pictures, on the whole, if the lighting is decent. (All of the pictures I posted from the wedding were taken on it.)

We are still ~~squabbling~~discussing whether to go see Terminator: Salvation tomorrow. The reviews are bad, but a couple of random people who saw it seem to like it. On the other hand, Rob is surprisingly not so set on going as I expected, so we might wait a week or two, at least.

Also:
Today's Doonesbury is brilliant.

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Entries tagged with shopping

Book junkie

"These days"

Poor Things

At work

Merry whatever

Happy!

Pandemic catch-up post

Nothing much to see here

The mall and other holiday horrors

Another holiday spent up in the air

Excess in Texas

Dreaming of shopping

Shopping

The onion question

Hanging out with Anthea

Ikea love

Notes from the road, so to speak

Holidays and shopping

Let's see, is this Thursday?

Five random things...