stormy shopping

Oy vey! What weather we're having today!

As I look out the window right now the sky is blanketed with these pale browny-orange greyish clouds... the wind is a-blowin (periodically) and it's all a bit yucky looking. Cool, but yucky looking. And, surprisingly, quite warm... it was supposed to be 31°C today... I'm not sure if it ever got there, but I wouldn't be surprised. But I don't mind it being that hot when it's all windy and stormy like this... it's just my kind of weather.

Now if only the dumbass children in my building would shut up so I could enjoy the weather (and the fact I have my lounge room windows WIIIIIIIDE open) in some peace and quiet.

C'mon Mother Nature, damn you... pour with rain already and drown the little idiots.

Also, this will come under the general heading of "Way Too Much Information" but my feet stink like a son of a bitch today for some reason. I can't work it out... I've been wearing my open red sandals all day, so it's not the whole "confined in shoes" thing... and the shoes themselves only stink a little bit... but my feet smell like... well, think of something that smells nasty, and that's how my feet smell. Which is weird, because they usually don't... honest! It wouldn't be so bad, but I keep getting a whiff... I can only guess it's something to do with the weather... although I don't remember ever having this problem before on days like this.

Moving on though, since the last thing anybody wants to do is hear about my stinkyass feet...

Let's talk about shopping instead...

Today wasn't a bad day for shopping... We didn't necessarily BUY a lot... but we went to a lot of places.

First there was the regular food shopping thing... blah blah corn... blah blah things off the "reduced rack"... blah blah inappropriate chocolate items... blah blah Iced Coffee... blah blah ham... blah blah Halloween M&M's in a Glow in the Dark bag... blah blah sliced ham...

Then after we'd come back here and I'd unpacked everything we wandered a couple of streets over to the North Adelaide Institute where they were having a second hand book sale. I think possibly they were stock from a variety of different second hand stores (although from what I ended up with, a lot of them seem to have come from the Port Adelaide Market Book Stall, but I did see other stamps inside books)... and quite possibly it was stuff that they just couldn't sell or didn't have room for or whatever... particularly since not only had some of the books seen better days, but there was a HIGH (and I mean HIIIIIIIIGH) proportion of crappy romance novels.

When we first got there it reminded me of the library sales we used to go to when I was in my teens... rows and rows and rows and rows of trestle tables, all filled with books lying on their sides and people by the truckload making their way up and down the rows.

Initially I didn't think I was going to find anything even halfway decent... I think I did a total circuit (if a completely disorganised one with no system or order to it) of all the tables and nothing jumped out at me... partly because of all the damn romance novels getting in the way, but also because there were about a trillion people all packed into this somewhat small hall, going up and down and up and down... and on occasion it was very much a test of my patience and to see if I could resist finding a hardback book or a weighty paperback to start bludgeoning people with. Luckily I was able to resist... and the longer we were there, the more the crowd thinned out.

It turned out we were there for an hour and a half all up... but it must have been at least half an hour before I picked up a book (and actually kept it in my hand after I worked out what it was). Interestingly enough though, I don't know if I actually ended up keeping said book, or if it got put back down again at some stage... possibly it was The Joy Luck Club (since I did end up bringing that home), but I know that the novelisation of Mars Attacks wasn't far behind.

Because everything was $1, I did pick up a bunch of stuff that was just really, really, really random and bad and wrong... and once I've read some of them, I might have to do a few Book Crossing "dumps"...

My favourite out of the "Bad & Wrong" pile has to be The Hephaestus Plague... part of the blurb on the back reads... "They came from within dark caverns in the bowels of the earth... a new species of insect - a beetle which needed to destroy in order to survive... the first creature other than man with the ability to create fire." It sounded SO bad, I just had to get it...

In the "Reasonable" pile, other than Joy Luck and Mars Attacks are the first two Bourne books (Identity and Supremacy), the novelisation of Short Circuit (a favoured movie of my youth), Beaches 2 (who knew there was such a thing as a sequel to Beaches!) and three books of the homosexualist persuasion... Maurice by E.M. Forster, Time of Our Darkness (which I used to own, but never actually read) and a silly little cartoon type book called Why Gay Guys Are a Girl's Best Friend. Interestingly enough I saw at least two or three people pick it up (all women), but they always put it back down again... so I felt like I had to save it. I'm sure it's silly and full of stereotypes, but it could be good for a giggle.

In the end, I went from not being able to find a damn thing to bringing home eighteen books... me bad...

After that we headed down to Marion because Ma wanted to start thinking about the whole idea of Christmas presents... I know... it's still October (although only barely)... but the stores do have their Christmas decorations out already, and the Christmas Pageant is only two weeks away... and then it's only about eight weeks until Christmas... damn... eight weeks... where the bloody hell did 2007 go? Seriously... wasn't it just March like five minutes ago?

Sorry... I got distracted then... what was I saying? Oh, yes... Marion. Marion is usually good for these kinds of excursions because it has one of every possible type of department store you could want, all under one roof... plus all the other little chi-chi-la-la shops.

And I have NO idea why, but for the first little while after we got there I was so Mr Grumpy Pants. I still can't work out what that was all about, although I did feel a tiny bit light headed when we got out of the car... so maybe it had something to do with that. I try not to take it out on Ma when I get like that, sometimes with varying degrees of success... or else I make sure I specifically tell her that I'm having a Cranky... not at her, but just in general.

I'm a moody little fucker really...

Fortunately it didn't really last that long.

I did manage to find a new pair of sweat pants at the Red Circle Boutique... EXACTLY the same style as the ones I have that are fast becoming unwearable... I did think that they were at least a size smaller... but turns out they're the same size too. I think the original ones were two sizes smaller from a pair I'd had before them. Who the hell knows anymore. I was halfway tempted to buy two pairs, just to stop the whole "I can't find anything in the style I like" problem from re-emerging... but it didn't turn out to be THAT much of a trauma to find a pair, plus they lasted a reasonable length of time.

Other than that we didn't really buy very much of anything... a few cheap candles at Dusk... something to add to the handbag I bought one of my cousin's girls... I want to get something similar for the older girl too... but I haven't seen anything that's RIGHT yet... I don't actually know what the hell I'm looking for, but I know that I'll know it when I see it.

And that was pretty much my day really...

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