the saturday routine

Today has been a mixture of useful and useless shopping, followed by a trip to the movies...

I know that most of the time I mention various bits of what we do on a Saturday, but I don't think I've ever gone through the whole morning ritual.

The routine is pretty solid by now... I get up on Saturday morning and I do all the tidying up I should have done all the way through the week and sort the apartment out... and when necessary (like this morning) I have the fan in the doorway sucking in cool air.

Then I take a shower (usually with the door left open when it's open already... I'm so gangsta... of course you can't see into the bathroom from the front door, so not really that gangsta) and get dressed then kill some time with something until Ma gets here. Of course, that whole routine kinda goes out the window if I happen to oversleep...

Once she gets here and we've gone "blah blah blah" a bit, we head off to the supermarket.

First stop is Baker's Delight for breakfast, then we head off to Supermarket Arena (okay, so it's really Foodland... that just sounds more exciting). We start at fruit and veg and wend our way down pretty much every aisle (usually with the exception the first one which is all pet food and cleaning products), ending up in frozen foods and dairy.

The downside to shopping really early like we do is that there often aren't that many registers open, which I understand, but at the same time it's annoying when a bunch of people all finish their shopping at the same time and there ends up being a bigass queue.

And it's equally difficult sometimes to get someone who actually knows how to pack a bag. When Ma retires I think we need to set her up in a consulting firm for all the major supermarket chains to instruct new staff on how to actually pack one of those big green shopping bags. It's rare that she doesn't end up fiddling and rearranging stuff, which sometimes I have to stop her doing when the checkout chick actually seems to know what she (or sometimes he) is doing.

Today's checkout chick was having a bit of an issue with packing... I don't think she was really awake yet, but we got there in the end.

Then, if Foodland didn't have Iced Coffee on special, we dump the first lot of groceries in the car and go across the road to either Coles or Woolworths (or if there's something we want we couldn't get at Foodland)... then a lot of the time we come back across the road, dump whatever else we got in the car and wander around Target.

And yes... today's trip to Target was part of the useless shopping portion of the day... well not so much useless as totally unnecessary...

And yes, the photo pretty much gives it all away... I bought a Barbie... yes, I know, shut up...

Not just any Barbie though... the Sydney Opera House Barbie from the Landmarks Collection.

Yes, it appears that I am, in fact, exactly that gay!

What can I say... me and the Opera House, there's a little bit of a thing there... and it is quite pretty...

Okay, shut up now...

Moving on... after Target we hit the car and head off home, and Ma sits on the couch while I unpack everything and randomly fling the bits of shopping that are hers in her general direction (not completely true, usually I unpack all my crap from the bags and then give them to her and she does whatever she wants with them... but sometimes there's flinging... usually with light stuff... but she also flings empty paper bags from Baker's Delight at me, so I figure we're even... kinda), then put everything away in the fridge that needs to be refrigerated and stack everything else on the back counter of my kitchen to put away later (which occasionally doesn't get put away until the following Saturday morning... oops).

Once that's done, I stand at the counter with my Iced Coffee and disassemble the paper (fuck off Real Estate and Racing and Employment... hello to the main part of the paper and the Magazine) before having a quick leaf through it (mostly this is because Ma then takes the paper home with her to read later... we could get two papers, but there doesn't ever seem to be much of a point).

And there endeth the routine... whatever happens next usually has a routine of it's own (going into the city, going down to Marion, etc) but it varies depending on what the hell we're doing, what we need and what we feel like.

We were undecided about today, but Big W was having a sale on Nintendo DS games (specifically the Lego Harry Potter one which Ma was kinda interested in), so that limited our choices to either Arndale (mostly boring and never takes us much longer than about an hour and change) or Marion (more choices, but also further away).

But this week is Movie Night... except nothing we really wanted to see was going to be playing at Arndale on Tuesday, and what I was thinking would be a good plan was only showing at Marion... plus when we went to Tron, the girl at the box office mentioned we both had a ton of points on our respective cards but because Ma's card is a Seniors Club thing we could just rock up at the counter with it, we didn't need to book online like you do with my card (which I think is kinda dumb).

Is everybody following me so far?

We decided to go down to Marion, do what we needed to do then go and see "Love and Other Drugs" with Ma's free tickets.

Which we did...

Of course we also went looking at Big W (and hello Hot Ponytailed Ranga Door Greeter!) for DS games (Ma may very well be rocking out Lego Harry Potter as we speak), I was supposed to find a new pair of track pants for walking, but didn't... although I got a pair of Bonds shorts instead which aren't bad (I'm wearing them as we speak... a little on the short side, but comfy). Ma also made use of the Perfume Connection gift voucher she got at Christmas to buy another one of the new Harajuku Lovers perfumes and I tried a bunch of the new D&G fragrances which were all a bit m'eh.

Oh and I bought a pair of those headphones that go over your ear... they're kinda cheap, but I just wanted to see if I like them.

I also had to buy some painkillers because after we left Big W I realised that what I thought was the weird vision thing caused by me staring into the bright lights in one of the cabinets for too long was actually one of those rotating whirling "moving around making a circle" things that usually signifies I'm about to get a headache. I'd say it was a migraine type thing, but the headaches are never like I hear people describe migraines, so I don't know what the hell is going on. Luckily though I've learned that as soon as I see the weird vision thing, if I take a couple of painkillers because the circle completes itself, then I never actually get the headache.

After we'd finished wandering around we went up and bought the movie tickets (or rather got the tickets, since we didn't actually "pay" for them) then went and had some lunch before grabbing some Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and some water and heading back to the cinema (and hello Hot Monochromatically Dressed Ranga Ticket Ripper!).

As a brief sidebar, while the emotion I most often feel when dealing with or viewing people in the world is frustration, there's also an element of fascination. The seats were all allocated, as Marion does (which I still think is stupid for anything other than evening sessions on weekends, but that's just me) and one couple decided not to sit in their allocated seat because, frankly, the woman was a bit nuts and was all "I can't sit on this side of you because that's my bad ear, so instead of swapping seats with you I'm going to move to the other side of you and take an unallocated seat"... What the hell her ear had to do with anything, it's a movie and she shouldn't be talking to her fucking husband during the movie anyway! But because they'd deviated from the plan I think it threw about four other couples into disarray...

I mean, I'm all for throwing off the expectations of assigned seating, but because it was a small cinema (I told her to put us "in the middle" and we were two rows from the back) it created a domino effect... Couple A were in the wrong seats, so Couple B moved down to the next row, then Couple C came in and they were supposed to be were Couple B were, so they made them move down and sat next to them but then Couple B moved completely... you get the idea...

As always, the movie will get it's own post shortly...

Afterwards, we headed back down to the car and tootled off down the road back to my place while I resisted the urge to swerve violently into every group of lycra clad posing wankers I drove past. Stupid fucking Tour de Cardboard...

So, yeah... possibly one of the most "Random Shit About My Life That Nobody Needs To Know Or Gives A Damn About" posts I've ever written (which is saying something)... but now you know. And I apologise for what I'm guessing are a whole bunch of run on sentences...

Also, I now own a Barbie.

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