shopping

To cap off last night: the sinking sickening feeling of knowing one of my fabrics really and truly wasn't working in my quilt pattern. Jacob helpfully pointed out last night that this is the risk of doing everything myself: you get to take the credit for everything that goes right, but you have to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, too.

I took the painfully mismatched block to my local fabric shop at lunch today, hoping for a double pink to salvage the day. Nope. None. So I called the shop I'd ordered from, originally, and had a rockin' awesome customer service experience.

 Essentially:

I have a question for my phone geek friends. My current workhorse phone is a well-loved and well-worn Nokia 6800.

It is a market anomaly: it is one of the few phones available that has a QWERTY keyboard. I have loved it because it has suited my needs well over the years. My phone tends to be used more for text messaging than phone calls, so I value ease of text input over most of the flashy functions that other people obsess over.

It does not have Bluetooth, though, and I'm really wanting a wireless headset. Adam's call last night to test out his new Jawbone headset impressed both of us greatly. I wantses one of those.

My parameters:

Sarcastically muttered near the peanut butter: “Holy shit! Thanksgiving is this week? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me? When did this start getting scheduled in late November?”

After nearly eight years of living here, it’s rare now that I feel like a fish out of water, but there’s one store left in this town that makes me self-conscious every time I enter it.

I heard that. You, you, and especially you, you dirty-minded little thing—I’ll see you after class. Not everything in my life is about that.

Despite everything that’s said on television and in those alluring ethnic cookbooks with their come-hither-and-eat-me covers, I’ve been wondering if I’m the only gaijin hitting up the pan-Oriental markets this side of the Mason-Dixon line. If the stunned and frankly nosy looks of the shopkeepers are any indication, my hair and eye color are either setting off warning bells or I’ve suddenly started looking like a shoplifter.

The incantation remains the same:

Memory, leave me something - I lose so much on a daily basis; give me this, on days when I was happy, for the days that will inevitably come when I am not, so that I may remember the taste of these moments that, inevitably, go…
— 'Rockies on my right,' 10 October 2004

Any other day, I would have said that this day did not go as planned, but in truth, we had few plans; just notes and directions scribbled down in a notebook, hopefully enough to get through the day. Denver was supposed to be Saturday, but Chris came down with a bug. Instead, I watched television, made food, and gamed with Jake while Chris slept off the worst of it with NyQuil.

I said I wouldn’t become my mother, and that you would never find a rack of shoes in my closet and another set underneath my bed and another set of lesser-used shoes underneath the guest bed. I still say that. I think it’s true; knowing a potential pitfall exists can sometimes help you avoid it.However, I skirted one pitfall only to discover another: the cult of Nordstrom. I get it, oh, I get it.

It was the damn makeup, see.

Back in September 2003, I wrote about my unexpected discovery of the goodness of Birkenstock, otherwise known as shoes that actually fit (the entry ‘hippie sandal-wearing freaks’). Since then, my momentary $50 splurge on off-white Birks has proven to be one of the wisest $50 expenditures in my adult life. I knew I had unusual feet, but I figured I just wasn’t trying hard enough to find shoes that worked for me.