overheated splurging saturday

Would you believe that photo is half of the most expensive photo ever? $3.3 million for a photo taking inside a 99 cent store... jeeze...

Anyway, guess what... it's freakin hot!

Thankfully there is respite in sight (a change tomorrow evening, then a couple of days of cool, a couple of days of heat again then very cool with the chance of rain on Friday)... but obviously, everything today was about trying to stay as cool as possible for as long as possible. The Universe didn't always cooperate, but still.

We took my car to the stupidmarket this morning (mmmm aircon... I love my car's aircon), actually picked up much more stuff than I've done in the past few weeks... including several packets of jelly crystals, one of which is a "Create-A-Jelly" flavour, just add your favourite drink... somehow they make it seem all new and exciting, but all it really is is a packet of unflavoured gelatine. We'll see how my White Grape and Passionfruit jelly works out though.

After the supermarket part, we also took a turn around Red Circle Boutique, only to find that their airconditioning wasn't working for some unknown reason... so they'd resorted to rented portable cooling units which had giant ducts leading up into the ceiling but were blowing out wonderfully cold air... I very much wanted to unplug one of them and roll it out the front door, but I think that could have been a little obvious.

There was a quick detour to the Honey Man on the way home (and you know it's hot when honey pours in seconds rather than minutes), then the Ritual Unpacking, followed by a trip to the bank with my incredibly heavy $650.

Actually there was a degree of effort that went into getting the money to the bank... most of it went into my big purple sports bag, but the rest went into Ma's little backpack, then into the car, at which point the suspension dipped significantly under the combined weight, off to the North Adelaide Village, then we stuck the bags in a trolley and wheeled them off to the bank. You know that feeling when you're trying to go around a corner but the trolley doesn't want to... I had that at least twice, and the trolley really wanted to keep going off in a straight line which must have looked very odd to anybody watching, because it didn't look like there should have been any weight to the trolley.

The women behind the slightly pointless counter at the bank seemed bemused as I wheeled the trolley in there (not that they seemed like they had anything better to do), and then I announced that I had brought along a "vast amount of coinage" which I think added to the amusement value. Then there was much extracting money from carrying cases, piling it up on the counter, weighing it and adding it all up.

Turns out that somehow I was out by a single 50c piece... I have no idea how the hell that happened, but I was, which would have meant that I was only depositing $649.50, and that's slightly less impressive somehow... unfortunately I didn't have a handy 50c piece on me (and Ma's purse was still in the car)... when I mentioned that the woman disappeared off to one side for a moment (I wasn't paying attention, I was still sorting out bags of coins) and came back bearing a 50c piece... woohoo... free money from the bank!

So once everything was all added up and totalled and deposited, I was happy, they were happy (and I'm sure they'll be able to call head office now and cancel any order they had for more coins... at least for this week). I do need to work out a better system though... something where I end up with exactly the $10 I need to fill the bags of each type of coins. Maybe I need to chat to J about it...

The Nice Money Counting Lady did make a suggestion though... opening a Christmas Club account and putting all my coinage money into that throughout the year... which seems like a reasonable idea... at least if and when I'm working (because otherwise I need as much coinage as I can get). We used to do Christmas Clubs when I was a kid... or at least Ma did... I think I had one at least once. But it's something to consider.

Anyway, once that was all done we headed off for the cool of Marion.

When we were trolling though the underground car park looking for a space (and avoiding all the people who's brains seem to have melted in the heat) I thought I crossed vehicular paths with local B-Grade celeb and breakfast radio host Fitzy... turns out it wasn't him though...

As you would expect though on a day like today after a week like we've had weather wise, the whole place was packed... and like I mentioned with the carpark situation, people were just insane... I ended up having to give this very tall guy a shoulder to the ribs because he was just heading towards me and taking up all the available space while talking on his mobile. I didn't go out of my way to do it, but when I saw he wasn't going to move I just set my shoulder and didn't try to get out of the way. Grrr...

I don't know if it was because I'd just deposited a big chunk of change or not, but it did become something of a splurging day... not on random crap, but mostly on clothes (well, teeshirts and polo shirts to be honest). I did have a bit of a "Willow (The Body, Act Three) moment" about the teeshirts... one is a cool Japanese language Batman thing and the other is Cookie Monster... so not only do a lot of my shirts have "stupid things on them" (to quote Willow), but most of them are actually very dark, if not black... which seems stupid in Australia during the warmer months. Of course all the polo shirts are pretty damn standard so they can be worn to work when it's hot, or Friday, or both.

We also had a bit of a casual look at the Nintendo DS Lites... Ma commented a little while ago that she'd been thinking about getting one, with the whole "Brain Training" game thing... so I kinda suggested that it might be an idea for Christmas (and paid for by our old friend, my coin collection). Of course that would mean that I wouldn't be going nuts with the sheer number of presents as last year... not counting the things that already taking up space in my wardobe, as well something new from the Harajuku Lovers fragrance line.

I also finally found a card for H-San's birthday... I've been looking on and off for the last couple of weeks but hadn't found anything I really liked (even though his birthday isn't for another couple of weeks)... but this I liked... and oddly enough it was in the very first place I thought to look for cards today, and it was one of the first cards I picked up... and that's very rare.

All in all, a good day for the shopping...

We also tried this new tex-mex place in the food court (and just suddenly remembering I didn't pick up a menu on the way past... thank the stars for the interwebz, even if the site is really odd)... definitely have to go back there when the weather sorts itself out though. The food court was kinda overheated... I don't know if it's just from all the food cooking, or if the aircon just couldn't cope or what... but it was a mite stuffy...

And that was about it really...

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