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.