the seasonal shopping beast awakens

Okay... so the title of the post may be a wee bit melodramatic...

But given the hugeness of today and the fact that it was also the Christmas Pageant it all just felt very epic...

And I really do feel like I can hear the gigantic Christmas Shopping Beast stir within it's tinsel and wrapping paper lined cavern and flex it's red and green claws.

Ahem... like I said, it's been a very, very, very long day.

It all started reasonably normally. I woke up, tidied the house a little better than I've done since we got back (by which I mean I actually did some tidying). That did mean that I was a little behind schedule by the time Ma got here... but I'd gotten on a roll and didn't want to stop tidying up until I reached a natural stopping point.

The rest of the usual shopping pretty much went along in the usual fashion...

Then we kinda got a little caught up watching the Christmas Pageant on teevee when we got back here (but with the sound down... the commentary has always had the ability to rot your brain within seconds)...

But before long we headed out for something of a homewares extravaganza.

We started at Freedom... they had both some Nutcracker/toy soldier related products and some seahorse related things. So I bought Ma some of the latter and she bought me some of the former... it's all very reciprocal.

Then we headed over to Ikea, mostly to check out their Christmas stuff... and poke around to see if there was anything that could be used as Christmas presents or parts thereof. Well, for Ma anyway... thankfully I never have very many presents to get.

I'm sure that somewhere, some learning institution that teaches a course on the psychology of shopping much have a whole module on Ikea stores. It's a carefully constructed maze designed to carry you around and make you pick up things you wouldn't otherwise have thought about. Other stores do it, but Ikea is particularly good at it.

Even skipping the entire top floor, we were still in there for a while.

The third part of the plan was a little more ephemeral... we'd been tossing up between the city and Marion, the former specifically to go to Optus about new phones, the latter as more of a "looking for presents" kind of idea.

We decided on town... the Pageant had been over for a while, and we figured it would probably have calmed down a little. I did have second thoughts as we were on the way in... but nothing concrete, just a random feeling that we'd make the wrong choice.

In the end it turned out to be something pretty minor, and the good outweighed the bad.

We started with Target... Ma wandered around upstairs while I went looking at clothes downstairs... I ended up with $133 worth of clothes (jeans, three tops, a belt and some thongs), but only paid $100 for it, which is good. Although on the down side, I'm going to have to take the belt back because I assumed the size I got was the right one, turns out it wasn't (but I only worked that out when I got home). Annoying.

After that we headed to the same Optus store that we've gone to for our last two phones at least, only to find that they were shut. And not even just that we missed them in the morning, the store is now shut on weekends. Bad for them and bad for us. And I think that was the thing that I was unsure about... somehow.

Anyway, we headed into the City Cross food court to get something to eat while we planned our next move.

We decided to go and kick the tyres at the Optus store near Haighs, just so that Ma could get a better idea what was available in the iPhone oeuvre.

And the nice boy in the store went through all the options and Ma decided to get the phone there and then. So she's now the proud owner of a white 8GB iPhone 4 with a somewhat sparkly cover. I swear though, the whole phone contract renewal thing just taken forever. What with all the explaining, and signing three copies of the form and blah blah blah...

Once we'd done it all once for Ma's iPhone, we had to do it all a second time for my iPhone 4S. Of course I don't actually HAVE an iPhone 4S currently... they're on "rain-check" at the moment, and it should come in within the next three weeks, give or take.

After a brief stop at the Optus store at the other end of the Mall so that they could cut Ma's sim card down to size, we had a brief wander around the tragic little market in Hindmarsh Square (I'm guessing they brought it forward from tomorrow to take advantage of the Pageant... but it was about a dozen stalls, none of them particularly interesting), then headed down Rundle Street to Cocolat.

We then bought a couple of cold drinks and sat in Cocolat for just over an hour while I showed Ma all through her new iPhone. I'm not sure how much of it stuck... but we went through a few things more than once, so hopefully she got that stuff.

Now that it's all written down, it doesn't sound like a lot, but we were in each place for quite a while, so it was 4:45 before we got back to the car.

So... a very full day... Ma has an iPhone... I'm waiting on an iPhone... I have an outfit for Christmas Day... and the Christmas shopping season begins in earnest from now.

We're we just here not that long ago?

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