Big thanks to reader Denise in Georgia, who sent me Killing Critics. I love me some Carol O’Connell, indeed I do.
When I was bitching about cashmere sweaters and wondering why they were so expensive, someone should have pointed me to this entry of Willa’s. It all makes sense now!
I spent hours and hours out of the house today, which is highly unusual for me, so this won’t be a terribly long entry.
I left the house around 10:30, with the hopes of being back shortly before 1, picking up a salad and grilled chicken salad on the way home for lunch. I hit Sam’s first, because we needed tablets for the dishwasher (Electrasol – I use nothing else. Nothing, I say!) and shrimp (how sad is it that the best shrimp I can find in the area is the frozen shrimp from Sam’s?). To the utter shock and dismay of all the Sam’s stockholders out there, the only thing I bought was a big-ass refill bottle of Windex, because we go through it like water around here for some reason. I picked up and ultimately put back both The Millionaires and Basket Case, since they’re both on my wish list. Upon checking the prices on Amazon, though, I’m thinking I should go back and buy them, because they’re $4 cheaper.
Sam’s rocks. Just so you know.
After leaving Sam’s, I went to the mall, hit the bathroom, checked out the Hallmark store, and went into Lane Bryant, which was the entire reason I was there. Moira sent me some really pretty bras for Christmas (how cool is she?!), and I needed to exchange one of them. Since I’ve lost weight, I don’t wear the largest size in that store anymore – though to be honest, I think I wore a larger size than they even carry in their stores – and I ended up wasting over an hour in there, looking around, picking out bras, going through every bra on the sale rack to find the right size, and trying stuff on. I ended up with several bras and a couple of shirts, all on sale, and after fending off the salesclerk’s attempt to convince me I need new underwear ("Oh, I just bought some at Christmas!" <—lie) and get me to apply for a Lane Bryant card ("Oh, I have one! I just didn’t bring it with me!" <— lie), I headed back to the other end of the mall to buy some cards at the other Hallmark store, use the bathroom (3 liters of water will do that to you), eyeball the Godiva stand, and then I was out of there.
At this point, I’d blown the "home by 1" plan, because it was already 1:20. I called Fred and bitched to him about the fact that I wear one size on the bottom and another on the top (I’m apparently built like a linebacker), and headed for Target. I was looking through the Valentine’s t-shirts, when a woman came running up to me, looking all serious and concerned. I thought for a second she was perhaps a reader (I have a few in the area), but she was asking for money for Brittany someone, a little girl with leukemia (or was it AIDs?) I hadn’t one single solitary dollar on me, and I apologized, and she moved on.
That’s right. I apologized to some woman who came up to me in Target and wanted money.
I went back to looking at the shirts, and a moment later someone in a Target smock went by, obviously looking for someone.
That’s about the time it occurred to me that Target wouldn’t be terribly happy about someone walking around the store asking for money.
She was breaking the rules! And I apologized to her. I’m such a nice girl.
I ended up buying two of the Valentine’s t-shirts, which were marked at $7.99, but rang up for $5 each. Score!
Then I was off to look for long johns for Fred, the crazyman who goes jogging no matter the weather, but oddly, the only long johns they had were in Small or XL, and Himself wears neither of those sizes.
My last stop was in the section with the phones, where I stood and stared at the various selections for about ten minutes before making up my mind which phone to get.
By the time I left Target, it was 2:00, and since I hadn’t had anything but a shake after working out this morning, I was mighty hungry. I stopped at Wendy’s for my grilled chicken sandwich and big-ass salad, came home, and ate.
I’m having the worst luck finding a phone for the living room. When we moved here, we had a cordless phone/ answering machine combo that sat on the table next to the couch, but it started holding a charge for less and less time, even after I bought a new battery for it. So I bought an answering machine, and brought the cordless phone that had been in our bedroom downstairs. That died shortly after too (we got both phones at the same time), and so last week I went to Wal-Mart and bought a cordless phone/ answering machine combo for a low LOW price.
You know that saying "You get what you pay for"? It’s true. The phone sucks, it’s all staticky, no matter how many times you change the channel it’s on. So I bought a (I hope) more powerful one (2.4 ghz as opposed to 900 mhz) at Target today, and I’m hoping like hell it works well. If it doesn’t, I’m about ready to get a non-cordless phone for next to the couch, and call it good enough.
For someone who loathes talking on the phone, I sure am jumping through hoops to make sure we have a decent one, aren’t I?
I think I lied about this being a short entry.
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