headless shopping

And by "headless" I mean "running around like a headless chicken"... which is kinda what our Shopping Adventures™ turned into today... or felt like at least...

It also wasn't helped by the fact that the forecast for today was 38°C (although it got up to 40.5°C this afternoon according to the Weather Bureau's website)... so all hot and yucky...

We didn't do too badly during the Food Shopping Stuff... we needed to get back to my place before 10am, and due to a slightly earlier start and well organised shopping we managed that with no drama, and with a detour to see the nice Honeyman too (definition of irony... there were a bunch of bees buzzing around the shop... they come in with the honey deliveries I assume... but in addition to the buzzing ones, there were just as many, if not more, who had actually drowned in the "drip buckets" that hang off the nozzles... bees killed by their own honey).

I also went into Red Circle, after we'd finished the food stuff, to return the copy of Ferris Bueller that was freezing up on me... which I did, with no fuss, no bother, no nothing (unlike the drama Ma went through trying to return The Family Jewels last weekend, although we were only doing a straight swap over)... but then when I got it home, the first thing I did was throw it in the DVD player to see if it worked... same drama, gets to a certain point, gets all jittery, then freezes... so we took it back again, and ended up getting a refund (again, with no drama)...

Between the first and second trips though, we stopped by another book sale that was happening around the corner from my place... in the same hall as the last one, but a different organisation this time I'm pretty sure. And there really wasn't much of anything worth buying this time... yes there was a complete collection of Star Trek books, and a truckload of Doctor Who books and a lot of questionable non fiction and a vast number of book and teevee series related books... but all in all, not much of anything interesting really. What was a tiny bit freaky was the fact that there were quite a number of books that looked suspiciously like ones that I sold to the second hand bookstore down the road when I had my big, huge, massive book cull a couple of years back. I'm sure they can't be the same books... but there were a number of very familiar looking covers/titles...

Anyway, I came away with just three books, none of which are terribly interesting...

Then we went down to Arndale to get a copy of Ferris from Big W ($2 cheaper than they were charging at Target actually)... even after all the drama we had last week (different store though)... and they were selling off a bunch of their Christmas stuff quite cheap... we probably ended up getting more stuff than we really needed... but when they're selling out boxes of Christmas shaped pretzels for 50c a box, you buy four boxes (two for me, two for Ma). Same with boxes of crappy crackers for 60c a box (to be given away to other people rather than being kept for ourselves)...

But just after we left Big W, tragedy struck!

I'd gone through a different checkout to Ma since I was only buying DVDs and she was buying all the Christmas stuff on plastic, so I was done before her and swung back around to her checkout to grab the bags. Now as I came up, I remember seeing Ma's sunglasses inside her pink carrybag... but when we stopped not two minutes later to have a look at something else we'd bought, we couldn't find them in ANY of the bags... I should just have gone straight back to the checkout as soon as it looked like we couldn't see them, but I didn't, and neither did Ma, and by the time we'd finished checking all of the bags and whatnot, somebody had obviously walked through the checkout and just made off with them. Filthy, slimy, thieving bastards!

It's not like they were expensive sunglasses (neither of us do that), but they didn't look cheap, so somebody must have just pocketed them. We must have checked at the checkout about ten times between the two of us (not that the girl on the checkout was any use... like a lot of them, she seemed to have had a brain tumour for breakfast this morning)... and we both did a separate spin around the store to make sure she hadn't actually left them somewhere inside... I even went and asked at the Customer Service counter to see if anybody had handed them in... but naturally, no. Bastards, bastards, bastards.

Fortunately Ma is slightly OCD and keeps a second pair in her car for essentially no good reason. Bad news was we weren't driving in her car at the time.

When we got home, of course the first thing I did was put Ferris in the DVD player and check that it was working... and naturally enough, it didn't work. Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck! I'm willing to bet that it was all the same production batch, and none of them will play in my DVD player (the girl at Target did say that she knew some of the staff had bought copies and they'd been okay). But for just under $7 I'm going to keep it, skip over the bit that's screwed up (since I know exactly what happens in that section) and you never know, if and when I have to replace the player, maybe the disc will work in a different player...

*sigh*

Next we went into the city... since it's been around this time during the last couple of years where we've gotten Christmas decoration stuff really cheap (well, 75% off) at Myer... and today was no different. Although whoever decided that blue or a mix of cyan, chocolate and gold were good colours for Christmas needs a good kick in the head. And obviously there are only a finite number of babies that require "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments, because there were a TON of those left over too. We did manage to get quite a few nice bits and pieces though... more random than stuff from previous years (I think last year's haul consisted mostly of things that were star shaped). The most expensive stuff was about $2.50 (down from $9.95 I think), and the cheapest was 50c for a couple of loose pink baubles (no jokes about pink balls for $1 please). Scary really.

Also scary was the fact that even though I'm standing there very obviously in jeans and a teeshirt, this random girl asked me about the price of something like I worked there... okay, I was standing behind a counter with a cash register at the time... but it was clearly an unused one, and I really didn't look like a staff member... stupid girly.

Then we went downstairs to have a look at the sunglasses in Myer, and after making Ma try on just about every acceptable looking pair, she finally picked a pair (actually I kinda steered her towards them, but I think I did that with the pair she lost too)... they're a tiny bit masculine, but the frames are silver and they match in nicely with her hair. Plus, 30% off, so bargain!

After that we wandered down to David Jones to take a look at their Christmas department... PITIFUL! Plus, all their stuff was still only 50% off, so we didn't buy anything from them...

And that was about it really... we did stop off at a couple of bookstores, but more for the air conditioning than anything else.

I cannot tell you how much I'm looking forward to this cool change that's supposed to be coming in tonight or tomorrow morning...

Current Mood: