do-over saturday shopping

doing the vintage shop
It's not often in life you get a re-do... but this Saturday has been the good version of last Saturday.

Plus it's after 6pm and I'm still awake, so that's an added bonus.

And because it was a do-over kind of day, I managed to get my sixth sense back regarding when Ma arrives downstairs.

The supermarket portion of the day was fairly average... I did go a little nuts with come cheap goodies to hide in my desk at work to stop me from visiting the overpriced goody boxes in the office.

Like last week we really didn't have any kind of a plan about what to do with the rest of the day, but Ma was still looking for a clock, and I didn't want to do too much sitting in the car, so like last week we headed into the city.

And like last week we found an easy park on Rundle Street, easier in fact as we didn't have to do a loop of the block first.

We stopped off at Bimbo, just to have a look, and Ma ended up finding the perfect clock for her purposes there... so, you know, pretty much job done within the first ten minutes.

But we kept on wandering down the Mall. I wanted to have a poke around in Dymocks, mostly at possible books for when Tink's baby is born. I keep meaning to ask people (like you good reading people) what their favourite picture books were when they were kids, everybody has one that holds a special place in their heart and/or memory, and I'm looking for ideas outside of books I know.

Anyway, we poked around the kid's book section, I found How To Be A Viking by Cressida Cowell, the author of the How To Train Your Dragon book series. Weirdly the book seems to be called "Hiccup the Viking Who Was Seasick" everywhere else in the world. And if it turns out Tink isn't have a boy, then there are enough boys in our extended network that it won't go to waste.

I also rediscovered a book I haven't thought about in years and years... in fact I have absolutely no idea what happened to my original copy, but standing there in the shop reading it, I got all teary eyed.

Which is all kinds of weird because the book in question is The Clown of God by Tomie de Paola, and a fairly religious book at that. But I've always loved the illustrations and I think it was at least in part a reaction to finding an old friend in book form. I don't know if it's the kind of book that I can really give to anyone I know since they're mostly a godless lot (and I like them that way), but I also couldn't leave it there, so joining Hiccup in the bag is Giovanni the juggler, and I'm sure I'll work out something to do with it.

Upstairs in the grown-up section, I found a picture book for myself, the third New 52 Batman graphic novel, Death of the Family. Speaking of falling in love with the illustrations, I do love Greg Capullo's artwork, it has that slight manga look to it, but gets down and dirty when it needs to.

As we were walking past Kmart I saw a girl coming out carrying a bright yellow ceramic parrot. So I had to go and take a look (short version of the story, I didn't buy one, but I was tempted for a minute or so). I did end up picking up a couple of cheap sweaters that I can wear at work. I'm still on the hunt for some kind of grown-up type of jacket, in the leather or faux leather oeuvre... but with no luck.

One thing that I do enjoy about self serve check outs is that there's nobody there to tell you that you can't take the coathangers... so I did.

We wandered the length of the Mall, observing the stray young people who had wandered away from, or were wandering in the direction of, AVCON. One day, if somebody has a couple of spare free tickets to that I wouldn't mind going along, if only because it's always in the Convention Centre and I haven't really been to anything there. Plus, freaky young people in odd costumes.

Probably the stand out for weird costumes (more so because of the juxtaposition), other than the plethora of Pikachu onesies, was the girls from Frozen with a young man in an apron carrying a ladle (I have no fucking clue what that was about) and another young man in far too much black. Weird, just weird.

We made a brief visit to Haighs (mmmm toasted marshmallow, I loves you), then wandered somewhat aimless and pointlessly around the Myer Centre and had a poke around Harris Scarfes where I picked up a new money box for cheap before heading back up the Mall and going to lunch at Fancy Burger.

They still do excellent chips, and the tomato relish is still tasty. And because I had already been disappointed by their burgers once before, so I tried the chicken burger instead. I should have know from the fact that they all came as standard with avocado that was going to be problematic. Fortunately substituting something else in place of the avo was easy... but the burger was still a little... average.

That was pretty much it really, other than a quick stop off at T2 to pick up my free sample of tea they don't officially launch for a while.... yay for exclusive freebies.

So, yes, a much better Saturday... no grumpies, no pre-emptive sleepies.

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