flying solo shopping

Yep... I was flying solo again this week...

Ma is off in that place that she goes when she goes away... so I went shopping all alone again. And it was possibly both more, and at the same time less successful than last week...

I didn't end up buying a whole lot of actual food on my Supermarket Safari, but then I probably don't need a hell of a lot of stuff. So the whole thing, from start to finish, three supermarkets and a quick circuit around Red Circle only took me an hour.

In amongst discovering that my favourite Lynx shower gel "flavour" is now a discontinued line (naturally I bought four bottles) and being slightly annoyed because the completely indulgent item I bought last week is now HALF PRICE... I bought an extra little something (okay, it was a packet of Weetbix, and it was on special, what's your point) and added it to the "non perishable" food donation box outside Coles.

I'm kinda on a charity kick a bit this Christmas, or at least feeling like I should be... we've decided at work that instead of buying each other some random crappy presents for Secret Santa, we're going to pool the money and donate it to charity (buying something for one of the Wishing Trees seems like the way to go at the moment). I remember that either last year or the year before I got partially fixated on those trees... so if I can work out an appropriate random gift I'm probably going to do my own thing as well.

It was also kind of my job to find out more about said trees (Kmart has one, as does Target)... which I did...

Anyway, like I said, I was all done within the hour (actually I was back at my place within the hour, I happened to look at the time as I walked in the door), unpacked (which took about five minutes) and perused the paper...

Then I headed back out again... all I knew was that I wanted to visit a Kmart (for the aforementioned finding out about stuff), so I ended up going down to Marion (AGAIN)... at least this week wasn't quite so nuts as last week, and there were no phone related dramas.

But other than buying a new black fitted sheet to replace the crappy pale green one from Ikea that's too big, I didn't really end up buying anything, mostly I just wandered around looking at stuff.

The other thing I did a lot of was make eye contact with screeching toddlers and mostly get them to calm the hell down... I don't know if it's just me or if anybody making eye contact with said toddlers would get them to shut up, but it seems to work nine times out of ten, for which I'm grateful. There seemed to be more of them around than usual... but then it is the big build up for Christmas and lots of things everywhere that they want and needing to develop delayed gratification, so it's not really surprising that children of all ages go nuts at this time of year.

When I'd wandered enough and looked at enough stuff I headed home again... however my route happened to take me past The Christmas Shop... actually I've taken that route a number of times and it always takes me past there, it's just that today I happened to notice it just as I was passing and decided to stop.

It's kinda funny really, the first time I mentioned the store I said how tacky a store it was and how pokey and that "now that we've been there, we don't ever have to go there again"... and yet I think we've been back there two or three times in the last couple of years. It's still as pokey as all hell (and I thought it was bad when there weren't 800 people in the store), but while it seemed incredibly tacky in September, somehow it seems less so with 19 days left until Christmas.

How the hell they ever find anything in that store is beyond me... and as I overheard one old lady say to her husband, I have no idea how they would even begin to do a stocktake. Even the staff (most of whom I'm sure are just Christmas casuals) don't really know where anything is (favourite quote from one of the CC's when told that the larger tree angels would be in the "angel section"... "We have an angel section?"). What they do have though are a few different kinds of Toy Soldiers... just enough to get me into trouble, but not interesting enough that I went completely and totally out of control.

And I just realised that I've gone from having one toy soldier to having just short of a dozen of various types... whoops...

I did also pick up a little silver angel for the top of my pink desktop tree at work (it's so freakin tacky, but I like it)... actually that was the SECOND little silver angel I bought today... I saw one at Marion that I quite liked, but then I saw these other ones, so I bought one of those instead. I've put the first angel away with presents for Ma, if nothing else I'll use it as a parcel decoration...

Amongst the toy soliders, I ended up getting two more little ornaments (one is this cute little fat toy soldier, the other one looks slightly like he's gone insane and may want to hack everybody to death with his sword)... a slightly larger tin, spring jointed soldier who's on a base that you can attach your stocking to (which is good because I have a violently red and green toy soldier stocking) and one of the Russ Masquerade Ball figures, Marjorie Ette (yes, a female toy soldier... and they all kinda sound like Christmas drag queens... Bella Jingle, Anita Surprise, Decorina D'Tree, Areatha Joy, Bella D'Ball, Pepper O'Mint)... I've lusted after others in the range, but I'd never seen this one before... plus she was marked down slightly.

What was actually surprising was the fact that I never got impatient, I never got claustrophobic (did I mention that the store is pokey?), I never ripped anybody's head off and used it as a basketball... I kinda enjoyed the whole experience really.

But I think I've spent the past two hours blogging about it... so it's time to go and do something less constructive...

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