technological and seasonal shopping saturday

Things that I learned today...

• Jacaranda flowers smell like wee
• Ma having an iPhone means a lot of additional work for me
• Somebody forgot to tell everyone at Marion that Christmas is in 35 days, not 5 days
• I'm very, very glad that I essentially only buy presents for Ma

It was also an incredibly long day due to the fact there was much messing around with Apple products and laptops and whatnot.

When Ma got down I booted up her laptop to install iTunes (and had to download it twice because it suggested the 32 bit version when I loaded up the website, but told me I needed the 64 bit version when I went to install it... what the fuck)... only to discover that it wouldn't let me create an account without using a credit card... again, what the fuck?

H-San had the same problem with his iPhone at work, but I never had to do it when I got my iPhone... but thinking about it later it may be that when I created mine, I'd actually installed iTunes and plugged my iPhone in... so maybe that makes a difference.

Anyway, that delayed us a little in heading off to the shops.

I was very excited (probably more than is really healthy to be honest) to discover that Coles now stock the Grove Juice that we had on our last day in Brisbane... so juicy, so pulpy, so orangy... so good. And I may or may not have kissed the bottle a number of times in the store.

When we got back here there was more fiddling with iTunes... I bought Ma an iTunes card to see if using the code from that would allow me to create her ID without having to use a credit card. I was going to get her one for Christmas anyway... and Target was having a buy two $20 cards for $30 deal... so it all worked out nicely. And it turned out that that did the trick...

Technically, the first app I downloaded for her was iBooks, but that was quickly followed by Pocket Weather, Angry Birds and IMDB. You know, just the basics.

After that we headed down to Marion in my car... mostly so that I could put it away in the rear carpark when we got back since it's been sitting out the front since we got back from Sydney. Coz I'm lazy.

As I said at the start of this post, I really have no idea what the hell was going on with everyone at Marion... I mean we weren't really there THAT much later than we have been in the past... but it seemed like everybody was working under the assumption that Christmas is happening on the 25th of this month rather than in 35 days. There were people EVERYWHERE... generally taking up space and being in the way.

And it's not even like a Sydney level of busy... I mean I could be romanticising the memory a little bit, but people in Sydney didn't seem to do so very much standing around inconveniently and getting in the way. Maybe it's because people here aren't so used to there being as many people around, so they don't understand the concept of getting out of the way, looking where they're going and generally not being a dick.

But like I said, I could be romanticising The Sydney Experience.

I'm not sure how well we managed to knock off things on Ma's Christmas list... I know we knocked at least one major item off and a couple of minor ones, but we also did our usual trick of finding things for either ourselves or each other.

Eventually we'd had enough, so we called it a day.

Well, a day if you don't count the fact that we stopped off at The Christmas Shop. To be honest, I think that place has actually had it's day... on previous trips there was usually something worth considering at the very least, but the last couple of trips there's just nothing. Plus the place was full of people, which is never good considering how small and cramped that place already is.

That was where I discovered the unfortunate thing about Jacaranda flowers... the street near the shop is lined with them, and it really did just have that "stale public toilet"/"Sunday morning in the city" kind of smell. Weird, and kinda gross... I'm also not sure why I've never noticed it before.

Then it was back here after a brief stop at my supermarket.

It was about 4:30 when we got back, and then I updated the iOS on Ma's phone, loaded some CDs onto her iTunes, synced her phone and other non-specific tech related nonsense... and by the time we've loaded all the updates on her laptop and I sent her on her merry way it was well after 6...

Like I said... another very big Saturday.

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