Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Weekend Update

Having spent the previous week in the unusual position of being completely broke, we decided to spend THIS weekend going out and about and having some fun.

Saturday morning, we had a lazy morning lounging around the house, before heading over to North Point Mall to get haircuts. Having gotten that out of the way, we stopped at the Godiva Store next door to get some lovely chocolate and fruit. I had a giant strawberry dipped in chocolate, while kitanzi opted for a little chocolate basket of mixed berries. Both were indescribably yummy. We also picked up a couple of raspberry truffles for later.

Next, we went down to Waldenbooks to use the two $5 coupons we’d gotten for being in their Preferred Reader program. We ended up with a lovely book of maps based on JRR Tolkien’s stories which were painted by John Howe. Utterly gorgeous, and one of them may well end up getting framed and put on the wall somewhere.

From there, we headed over to Victoria’s Secret for some clothes shopping, where Kit was able to find something that actually fit well and was far more comfortable than anything she already had. And now we’ll get their catalog as well, so it’s pretty much a win all the way around. 🙂

This more or less exhausted our interest in North Point, so we got in the car and headed over to Gwinnett. My ex had e-mailed me a couple of days before and told me the Wizard of the Coast store was going out of business and deep-discounting everything in the store. Unfortunately, by the time we could get over there, they’d been pretty well picked over, but I did find the first KODT Illustrated collection for $7. Nothing else was really worth taking home, though, alas.

We dropped by Richs-Macys to say hi to K., who took her break and chatted with us for about half an hour or so. It was good to catch up with her, and she looked like she appreciated the break. We left the mall and headed over to Shogun for a lovely dinner.

After dinner, we dropped over to The Love Shack to shop for toys and browse the porn. We jokingly asked the manager, when he asked if we were finding everything all right, if they had a copy of “Lesbian Spank Inferno”. He not only got the reference, but informed us that there had been no less than five adult films made with that title — one from Australia, two from the UK, and two from the US. Whether they pre- or post-dated the Coupling episode I didn’t ask. Sadly, he didn’t have any of them in stock. We finished browsing around, made a few purchases, and went home.

Sunday was another bright sunny day, and I had a project in mind that I’d been putting off for a few weeks. See, we were once again completely out of shelf space. This becomes a problem for us eventually, as we don’t tend to stop acquiring books just because we’ve run out of places to put them. So we went over to Home Depot to get all the necessary materials to set up another rack of shelves on the wall. While I was there, I picked up an electric screwdriver to make the job a bit easier. (I have screwdriver bits for my drill, but it runs much too fast for working with the soft walls — it tends to punch the drywall anchor right through the wall, leaving a giant hole. No good, really.)

I had to wait for things to charge up, so I wasted some time online while kitanzi went shopping for groceries. (I really should have been doing laundry, but…) Eventually, I set up the first half of the shelving. I hadn’t waited long enough for the charging, though, and so we put things back on the charger and decided to go drop our trade books at the used bookstore and see if they had any new stock worth carrying off.

We got about $20 credit for the books we dropped off — almost all our trade-in stuff was duplicates we got through e-Bay lots so it was a fairly random stack. The SF section included a few choice grabs, including a couple of Diana Wynne Jones paperbacks in pristine condition. We might have escaped relatively intact, except that I wandered over into the Kids and Young Adult section. There I found a stack of Encyclopedia Brown books, which I grabbed, and an extensive selection of Gertrude Chandler Warner’s Boxcar Children books, which I also got a small stack of. (Warner only wrote 19 books before her death. Apparently sometime in the early 90s, the publisher found someone else to write another couple of dozen or so. Has anyone read these newer ones? I’m terribly suspicious of them, and as a result didn’t buy any of them.) Also picked up a copy of Pippi Longstocking. I love recapturing my childhood. I’ve nearly completed my Danny Dunn collection as well. 🙂

Laden with books, we popped across the parking lot for a late lunch at Qdoba, where we got into an interesting discussion with the guy behind the counter about the fires in Moscow and his trip to Moscow when he was a teenager. After eating, we headed over to Staples to get some more bookends and some sheet protectors for my filkbook.

Went back home, finished the shelves, watched some TV, did a little laundry, chatted a bit with my friend Jeff on AIM, and went to bed.

And that was the weekend.

Previous

Random Conversation

Next

Kitty update

10 Comments

  1. Sounds like fun. 🙂

    A.

  2. I loved the Boxcar Children books when growing up. I ran into one of the later ones, and they’re horrible, all PC, all changed around, totally plastic. Blech.

    DWJ… yay!
    And yay for Danny Dunn and Pippi Longstocking. Do you have the Miss Pickerel books? And Edward Eager? Also, Joan Aiken?

    • I loved the Boxcar Children books when growing up. I ran into one of the later ones, and they’re horrible, all PC, all changed around, totally plastic. Blech.

      Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of. Henry, Jesse, Violet, and Benny have such distinct voices in my head that I don’t think I’d enjoy a book where they were the slightest bit off.

      DWJ… yay!

      Yep! 🙂 DWJ is one of the few authors I will buy on name alone.

      And yay for Danny Dunn and Pippi Longstocking. Do you have the Miss Pickerel books? And Edward Eager? Also, Joan Aiken?

      Hrm. Miss Pickerel rings vague bells, but it’s been forever since I read them if I read them at all. Edward Eager rings no bells.

      I didn’t read Joan Aiken until I was an adult, and haven’t read nearly enough of it.

      Another childhood series I want to collect is JD Fitzgerald’s “Great Brain” books. I have #3, and I know there were 7 books in the series. (Or at least, 7 that I’m aware of).

      • DWJ is one of the few authors I will buy on name alone.

        Me, too. And if I run into used copies, I’ll like as not buy them to pass out to friends :-). Not that I find them used much at all…

        Miss Pickerel is in the Danny Dunn-type book, but with an eccentric spinster instead of a school-aged boy. She has younger friends, I believe.

        Edward Eager rings no bells.

        This is a horrible situation, and must be remedied immediately. They’re all wonderful, and amazingly undated. Literary and fun, with some overlapping characters, though you don’t need to read them in any particular order. Just wonderful books. And any self-respecting library will have them, too.

        The Great Brain books are great. I don’t have them all yet (it feels too odd to buy the whole boxed set when I’ve got some of them already, so I keep going to used bookstores… plus the hunt is fun). I think it is 7.

        • Edward Eager

          Amazingly, I too read these in childhood, from our local public library -- I believe the only one I possess is the Thyme Garden, but I keep my eyes open in second-hand bookshops.
          Who could resist A Lakeful of Magic, after all, at the age of eight?

          • Re: Edward Eager

            Strangely, Magic By the Lake is the only one I didn’t read as a kid…

      • Miss Pickeral lived in an upside down house and it was all short stories about kids with various problems. One might have the “I don’t want to’s” or whatever, and she always had some ingenious “cure”.

        I keep meaning to get those for Britt.

  3. Books from Childhood

    Rob:

    I remember really getting into the Encyclopedia Brown books, and the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series. Ever read any of the Matthew Looney books?

  4. *sigh* I remember the Boxcar Children books.

    And Beezus and Ramona, and Henry Huggins, and the baseball books by Duane Decker, and…

  5. favorite young-adult books

    Have you read the Enid Blyton childrens mystery series? Can’t remember the name of the series, but I do remember the author’s name. If not, great stuff, I think you’d enjoy it.

    What about Madeleine L’Engle? There were lots more books in the series than just A Wrinkle In Time…

    Ah, good memories…

Leave a Reply to aiela Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén