Sunday, December 21, 2008

christmas shopping

congratulate me, i am done with my christmas shopping. my original goal was to be finished shopping by dec 1. of course this goal was not met. i once again practiced a fun pastime i learned on the mission: making goals that are so outlandish they will never be reached. but i just got online to buy my very last gift. i've been following the price for more than a month now and i finally bought it. i am done done done with my christmas shopping. by dec 21. excellent. actually, this is something i need to work on in real life. because it's for christmas and it's for other people, i kept working on my goal until it was finished. however with normal goals, if i don't make them by my deadline, i completely give up and drop that goal. i don't know why this is exactly. i guess i'm just a give-upper. next year i plan on putting a lot less time and effort into buying gifts because the gifts i've given so far this year (after TONS of thoughtful contemplation by the way) have not been very appreciated. so i guess i'm giving up on that too. sad isn't it?

i have only two life goals, neither of which are completed. they are as follows:
1) own all the seasons of The Cosby Show on dvd.
2) have my own apartment.

i am actually pretty close to accomplishing this first one. not because of any effort on my part though. last year for christmas my sister and my parents bought me season 1-6. only 2 seasons to go. sweet! and since i'm currently living with my parents, i am not even close to my second goal. and really, i'm not actively working on either of these goals. hmm. it's probably better that i don't own all eight seasons, because if i did i would have accomplished one of my life goals and feel validated and end up living with my parents till i'm 40.

3) don't live with my parents until i'm 40.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

black friday

i always wondered how shopko stays in business. i really did. it seemed like no one ever went there. but now i understand. shopko makes ALL their money on black friday.

so on thanksgiving i scoured the ads that came in the paper to see if there were any good sales that i wanted to get in on. i was already planning on going to the mall because one of the stores had an AMAZING deal on one of the things my older sister wants for christmas. i also needed ideas because my dad is impossible to shop for. when asked what he wants for christmas (or his birthday as they are both in december which makes shopping for him twice as difficult) he says nothing. nothing. after pressing him for weeks he finally said, "well...you could get some food storage." lame. lame lame lame lame LAME. food storage as a gift? get real. [on a side and completely unrelated note: another really lame gift that i've seen some people give is cigarettes. i mean, come on. it's like giving someone a little box of cancer.] so anyway, we saw something that might work for my dad at menards which opened at 5am. this is not as early as a lot of other stores that opened at 4am and so my older sister, my youngest sister and i agreed to wake up and leave the house at 5am.

now i have never EVER gone shopping on black friday before. i never thought it was worth it at all. if something normally costs thirty bucks and is on sale for fifteen, i'd rather pay the fifteen more dollars than get up at 4am. i also always thought that the people who did get up were crazy. crazy like insane, not crazy like funny. but this year i am hoping to spend a record low amount on christmas gifts. not because i'm cheap...because i'm poor. actually those might be the same thing. but also i'm not really doing anything else, so why not? we woke up, got in the car and left at 5:15am. it was still pitch black outside but the roads were busy. very busy. theres a road here that has target, shopko, menards, kohl's, and walmart (in that order) with some other stores in between them. it was CRAZY. there were no parking in the shopko parking lot AT ALL. people were parking and walking quite aways to get there. so we were surprised when menard's parking lot was pretty empty. there was also a really long line of crazies waiting to get into the store. it was bitterly cold outside and this is something i can say i will never do, no matter how good the deal. it's not worth frostbite. i looked at the ad again and realized that menards didn't actually open until six. oops. so we drove to the mall and shopped there before returning to menards.

menards was insane. the lines went all the way to the very back of their HUGE warehouse. no one would let us pass, it took us ten minutes just to get OUT of the store, and we didn't even get what we wanted. it was there, but it wasn't worth it. by the looks of it, shopko and walmart were the same way. however, the mall was totally cool. there were hundreds of people there, but there was still decent parking and the lines moved fast. the longest we had to wait in line was 5 minutes. the people weren't acting like psychos and everyone was polite and decent. and i saved a lot of money. i'd figure out how much i saved but that would require effort. i think the people at the mall were really there because they thought the craziness of shopping on black friday was fun. there were people wearing black friday t-shirts and everything. and people were actually smiling.

afterwards we came home and turned on While You Were Sleeping and fell asleep on the couch. it actually turned out to be a pretty fun day. next year i might even go back to the mall. but i'm staying away from anyplace else. those other places just aren't worth it. i guess nothing's really worth it if you're not having fun.

Monday, November 17, 2008

me and my bad example

this sunday in Relief Society (it's a family ward) I was sitting on the edge of an aisle. this little girl kept walking in circles around and around the set of chairs. she was probably somewhere between one and two years old, a guess i'm basing solely on the fact that she couldn't walk very well. every time she went around the group of chairs she would pass her mother sitting in the front row paying no attention whatsoever to her kid and then she would pass me. over and over and over again. her hands were covered in mushed up nasty gram crackers and each time she stumbled by she would reach her hand towards me to touch me. this of course bothered me, not only because i was wearing a nice dry-clean only dress but because...gross. i would scoot away from her each time in an effort to avoid getting gooed. the woman who was teaching the lesson had been sitting across the aisle from me and her sans-zipper purse was sticking out a little from under her chair. there happened to be a box of colored-pencils in there and when the kid discovered this she clumsily pulled the purse out and removed the pencils. when i glanced up, all the women on the other side of the room were shaking their heads at me, implying that i should stop her from destoying the purse. or the pencils, i don't know. so i took the pencils and put them back in the purse and told the kid that they were not hers. now, anyone who's ever had an interaction with a toddler will know that this was definitly not the end of it. she pulled them out of the purse again, and i replaced them again. then she started kicking the purse, which of course is made of a fragile straw-like material. to get her attention to make her stop i had to touch her. i tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around, looked up at me, and started laughing hysterically. i know, i know, i'm supposed to smile and think 'how cute.' but let's face it, i'm not exactly what you would call a 'good sport'. i just looked at her and said "don't do that," which she obviously didn't understand because she doesn't speak English, and she went back to kicking the purse. to top all of this off, i kept getting rude looks from other women, as though she were my child or something. what am i supposed to do? pick her up? not gonna happen.

so after relief society ended my mom was telling two women about how funny it was when i moved away each time the kid tryed to touch me. they all thought it was funny too and in my defense i told them that i was wearing a nice dress and didn't want to get mushed crackers on it. and then one of them said "well, it's just a part of motherhood."

just a part of motherhood? when did i have kids? oh wait, i DIDN'T. i haven't chosen to get married and pop out babies, which is why i can still buy and wear nice dresses and other clothes with the expectation that i won't get gram-crackered, drooled on, spit up on, or otherwise slimed. this is one of the privledges of being single. let me enjoy it and quit expecting me to take over your role as parent. you're the one who's supposed to get barfed on. not me.

and come on, is it really expecting too much to think that a person should pay a little bit of attention to their kid? or at least clean their kid up before letting it wander around bothering other people and stealing their things? i don't think so, but apparently i'm wrong.

hmm...what else has happened at church lately? oh yes, i was used as a bad example in a talk at stake conference by guess who...a member of the seventy! yes, you read correctly, elder someoneorother came to our stake conference and told everyone that he'd seen a girl on her cell phone right before the meeting he'd attended earlier that morning. he said that when we attend a meeting we should arrive early and sit silently and reflect on the music and the spirit and all that.

so what happened was that he'd spoken at a meeting for just the single adults in the stake, a meeting i attended only because i would get to see lisa and which took place in the relief society room because there are only like 20 single adults in the stake. when we got there we sat in the front row, so we were probably about five feet away from this general authority. also, lisa was no where to be seen. so i texted her. to make sure she was coming. and he saw this. and told everyone about my bad example.

oh come on. yes, maybe it was rude to be texting (before the meeting even started) but isn't it kind of rude for him to assume that what i was doing wasn't important. i mean, what if lisa was inactive? wouldn't it be a GOOD thing that i was making sure she was coming? and let me tell you, when i was a missionary, we were never sitting in the meeting room reflecting on the music and whatnot because we were always on the phone making sure someone was coming to church like they promised they would. so technically, this is a pattern i learned on my mission. aren't those things we're supposed to keep? i thought so.

so you're not supposed to follow my bad example. quit texting at church. and what about me? i'm going to continue texting during meetings, because if i didn't you wouldn't have a bad example to not follow. :)

Friday, October 10, 2008

so i'm starting a blog that i'll actually let people read. i keep my other blog completely anonymous and secret. (1000 points to you if you can find it) but i thought there might be somebody out there who would actually want to read this. probably not, but you never know. someone could actually get THAT bored. since i have no life i'm pretty sure i won't be posting very much very often, but i guess you never know when something completely awesome will happen and i'll suddenly have tons of interesting posts to write. don't hold your breath.