Tag Archives: online shopping

Welcome to the Jungle!

etc., family, humor, , ,

I can just picture my husband dressed all in khaki, hacking his way through dense undergrowth (and overgrowth), battling anacondas, and adorned with a pith helmet. (Whatever that is. I can only assume it’s a hat full of pith.)

That’s my vision of Dan as an eco-warrior. None of this chaining himself to construction equipment, living in a treetop for weeks on end, or throwing himself between a harpoon and a whale.

He’s a kinder, gentler eco-warrior. He carries a trowel rather than a machete and a watering can instead of a canteen. Dan never met a plant he didn’t like. (Except for thistles. He had an epic battle with thistles one year, and I’m still not sure it’s completely over. The thistle is the creeping definition of an invasive species. But I digress.)

In fact, Dan never met a weed he didn’t like. In yet another fact, he’s never met a weed at all (unless you count the aforementioned thistles). To him, as he often says, sometimes at dinner parties, a weed is just a plant that grows where you don’t want it to.

Unfortunately, the city disagrees. To them, a weed is a plant ten inches tall or greater. (Thistles are generally taller than ten inches.) They’re not quite as bad as a Home Owners’ Association, but they get pretty snippy if you don’t snip plants off where they think you should. I try not to get involved in the epic battles this clash of cultures leads to. (I don’t always succeed.)

Anyway, Dan has changed his strategy. Instead of planting flowers or shrubs that get mistaken for weeds, he’s planting trees this year, which are supposed to get over 10 inches tall. (He’ll never see the fully grown trees, of course, but he wants to leave a little forest in the sloping space that would be impossible to mow anyway because it’s so steep. Not that he’d want to. But I digress again.)

He’s also given to making a small jungle inside the house. He regularly brings home plants from Meijer when they’re about to expire (or be dead, reduced in price, or thrown away). He has night-blooming jasmine, shamrocks, and some long-legged things that I fear are going to strangle me in my sleep someday. He brings me orchids for my desk, for no reason. He’s also very fond of hanging baskets of begonias and ferns.

Every year, he makes a wish list of plants that he wants for spring or fall. (I get to research them on the internet and find the money to pay for them. Then he (reluctantly) prunes his wish list down closer to the figure that I came up with. He always forgets to add the shipping costs, which are pretty high for live plants. I also get to check with the companies to see which plants are out of stock and which are available only as seeds rather than live plants. Dan wants me to be involved in his gardening, and I’d have to say I am, even if I don’t dig in the dirt. But I digress at length.)

These internet-and-catalogue expeditions occur regularly twice a year, in spring and fall. And spring is often defined as January, so that the plants he wants won’t be out of stock. Then comes the waiting and the pleas to check my email to see if the greenery has shipped yet. (All the correspondence comes to me since I am the one who does the actual ordering. My plant catalogue email list is as prolific as a spider plant. But I digress some more.)

Back when he lived in Pennsylvania, Dan had a small greenhouse attached to his parents’ house. I don’t think he has ever gotten over it and wants to replicate it here, which we can’t afford. (He had a “dwarf” banana tree in the greenhouse. When it touched the roof and started to bend over, he dug a hole in the dirt floor and sank the pot down into it, so the tree would have extra room to grow. He seems to have a visceral objection to pruning. But I digress yet again.)

This year for Christmas, I think I’m going to buy him that pith helmet, if I can figure out his size and find an online supplier. Maybe one for me, too, just so I can be involved in the eco-wars.

Christmas Is Over. April Is Coming.

etc., family, holidays, humor, , , ,

It was November, and I was manic. I had just gotten paid for a freelance job, and I went on the internet. I instantly started seeing items for sale that my husband might like. So I started buying.

(The mania was a part of my bipolar disorder and reckless spending is one of the known risks. At least I didn’t get into other risky behaviors like reckless driving. But reckless shopping is fun, and I hadn’t been able to do much recently. But I digress.)

The first thing I bought him was a t-shirt that said: Stay Groovy. I thought it was appropriate because any time a server in a restaurant asks, “How are you today?” he always says, “Groovy.” But then, he’s an old and unrepentant hippie.

Then I found another t-shirt, “Make America Grateful Again,” with the skull and lightning bolt symbol that the band The Grateful Dead used. I was off and shopping.

I found more t-shirts, all in the same vein, such as one with the lyrics to “In My Life” (Dan’s favorite Beatles song) and a shirt with a tie-dye hand missing one finger. (A reference to Jerry Garcia, the leader of the Grateful Dead, who actually had only nine fingers, despite the fact that he was the lead guitar player. Dan is frequently mistaken for Jerry Garcia, as his hair is the same wild, curly mass that Jerry had. Sometimes he tells people he is Jerry Garcia and in the Witness Protection program. And that he had the missing finger surgically replaced as part of his disguise. But I digress again, at length.)

Then I found what would turn out to be his main gift—a piece of the wooden stage from Woodstock mounted in a peace sign pendant—and relegated the shirts to being stocking stuffers. (It came with a certificate of authenticity, but who really knows? It’s the thought that counts. He put it on right away and has been wearing it ever since. But I digress yet again.}

It had become my turn to be Santa. (Dan is often accused of being Santa, especially (but not exclusively) in December. Again, it’s the hair and beard. He often plays along, telling children to mind their parents and play nicely with their siblings. This year, he even wore red sweats and a Santa hat to work on Christmas Eve, then went around the store handing out “Santa Bucks” coupons, “signed by Santa.” He even wore a nametag that said “Santa C.” It was all his idea; no one at the company put him up to it. But I digress even more.)

Was I done shopping? I was not.

While I was perusing t-shirts, I found one that showed layers of rock and said, “My Sediments Exactly.” Well, Dan studied geology in college, and heads to the fossils, petrified wood, and interestingly shaped rocks when we’re in a rock and gem shop. (He even brought home an “interesting rock” that he collected when we were in Ireland. He almost didn’t get it through Customs. But I keep digressing.)

So I pretended that the internet was a fossil and rock shop and fired up PayPal again. I bought basalt, various kinds of quartz, and several minerals that fluoresce under UV light. I also bought a UV light so he could appreciate them fully.

About that time (late November), it occurred to me that I couldn’t give him all these gifts for Christmas. It would be un peu de trop (a bit much). So I sorted the gifts into two piles: one for Christmas and the other to be saved for his birthday in April. I decided that the “hippie freak” gifts seemed more Christmasy, and the “rockhound” gifts more birthday-y. (Don’t ask me how I decided which was which. It seemed logical at the time.)

Anyway, on Christmas, I told Dan to get the pile of presents on the right-hand side of the closet. They proved to be a hit. In April, he gets the other stack.

Fortunately, there are no other present-giving holidays or occasions that occur until next Christmas. One never knows when mania and PayPal will take over. Or at least I don’t.

P.S. Dan never reads my blogs. Let’s keep this just between us.

Shopaholics Unite!

etc., fashion, funny things, humor, music, , , , , , ,

We talk about shopaholics the way we talk about alcoholics – as though it were some sort of addiction, presumably one that can be treated through a 12-step group (though I’ve never actually heard of Shop Anon). Alas, that’s not the case. Those of us who have spending problems largely have to go it alone. Our friends are more likely to enable us than to talk us out of it.

In the past, I’ve had spending sprees that focused on music. I still buy CDs occasionally, despite the fact that most music is now in the form of downloadable mp3’s. I tried to fight my urges by, first, buying CDs secondhand and second, dividing them into columns, or rather, stacks.

There was a previously-owned music shop (the music was previously owned, not the shop) in town called Second Time Around. Way back when, they sold vinyl record albums. My high school friends and I haunted the place and picked up music by our favorite artists. (At the time, we never considered that we were depriving those artists of royalties. Later in life, I was once inspired to send a quarter to an author I knew because I had picked up one of his books in a used bookstore. But I digress.)

I wandered through Second Time Around, picking up everything that caught my eye (or ear) and piling it up in my little basket. Then I would retreat to a window ledge and sort the CDs into different piles: Must Have, Would Be Nice, and Don’t Really Need. I would buy the Must-Have discs and a couple of the Would-Be-Nice ones, but abandon the Don’t-Really-Needs. Using this strategy, I arrived at a total that, while not totally within my budget, missed it by only a little.

This strategy has served me well over the years. Now the baskets are virtual, but I still fill them up with whatever attracts me and delete as needed (or not needed).

Over the past months, though, my overspending has kicked into overdrive and my doorstep has filled up with Amazon and UPS packages. Nowadays, I over-buy items we may need for our trip abroad (planned for the spring), such as power converters, sweaters, scarves, umbrellas, and guidebooks.

The other item I’ve been jonesing for is pajamas. I work at home, at my computer, so pajamas are my daily uniform. I have shelves of pajamas in my office closet and a few more upstairs in my dresser. I have nightdresses, nightshirts, flannel pajama sets, fleece pajama sets, shorty pajama sets for the summer, and a number of pairs of pajama bottoms that I can pair with the nightshirts for in-between weather.

Pajamas are one purchase that works well with the “stack in the basket and weed” strategy. My husband has been helping me curb my spending. He asks helpful things like “Is there enough money in the bank account?” and “Do you need more pajamas?” I explain to him that the pajamas, particularly out-of-season ones, are on sale at really good prices.

One thing that does keep me from buying pajamas with such wild abandon is the shipping prices. If the shipping costs more than the pajamas, I wildly abandon them – though with regret. I suppose I could rack up the total to where I’d get free shipping, but that feels like cheating on my attempted shopping abstinence.

Travel items and pajamas, I tell myself, are not really so bad. I used to have a thing for jewelry. Now that I work at home, I never go to places where I need to wear necklaces or earrings. So, really, I can skip the jewelry and just buy pajamas. Or else found my own Shop Anon group – perhaps with my husband, who has a comparable problem with seed catalogs.