Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Inspiration and Impulse Buys

About midweek, last week, The Elfling realized that her friend's birthday was this week and for the rest of the week we half-assedly tossed out gift ideas. Said friend apparently is big on cows...or seems to be going with that theme in her room these days. The Elfling's comment on that was “why can't she have a normal teen theme like zebra stripes?” It was seriously funny considering I'm pretty sure there's not one lick of zebra stripe in her own room...mind you....she's not really that much of a “normal” teen. Too much like me, I fear.

The weekend plea was for a trip to WalMart, where to be quite frank, she had no idea what she was going to get that was fitting of her friend's theme. On a Saturday afternoon during my day off, the very LAST place I want to be is there. Seems E was in agreement since we never went. I may have suggested better luck on Sunday, after work. Who knows why, but I don't mind going when I've been at work all day....go figure.

So on Sunday, I had a quiet moment and was pondering the whole gift situation...I did some searches on cow gift ideas and luckily didn't get actual gift ideas FOR cows....sent an link to the Elf via email for her to check out – hoping to inspire her so we'd have an idea where to go and not wander about cluelessly. A quick check of my email showed that I had a coupon to World Market so I mentioned we might go there and see if we can't find something neat...cowish. And so the plan was set!

Except....she made no mention to E about our plans...yargh! With the Elf in tow, E comes to pick me up, expecting a nice ride home only to find that we need to make a stop. There was a bit of grumbling on his part, a quick call to the Diva to let her know we weren't heading straight home and a mini-lecture to the Elfling about letting E know plans when leaving the house so he can put on shoes instead of schlepping about in slippers with the knowledge he'd be coming straight home.

Have any of you guys been to World Market? My first time there was a Christmas, where even before I went in, I felt like I should have had papers that indicated I was....ritzy... enough to go in...which I wouldn't be. The MacAuthur Center is maybe the first and last time I seriously felt that way – as a side note. Regardless of that, I think it has a lot of really neat things! First time there, I got this gorgeous dark chocolate and cayenne pepper bar – it was tiny but took a few days to get through. Such bliss! I've been wanting to go back and get a couple more and this was a perfect opportunity to do that.

So with the promise we'd hurry along, the Elfling and I headed on in and started poking around where we found....not a bit of cow to be found. Luckily, looking around really let us come up with a couple ideas for gift baskets. We wound up settling on a sort of bath pampering basket in shades of pink (the bday girl's favourite colour) and really got some cute things. It was inspiration!
 
Of course....then we come to the dreaded impulse buy....My coupon was contingent on spending 30 bucks to get 10 off....so I picked...a few things to help our purchase along....and wound up spending $50.....

On the bright side, the bday girl LOVED her gift basket. And I have another post I'll share with youse tomorrow.  

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