Archive for the 'shopping' category
Fresh and Easy (Tesco)
Julie| July 22, 2008 4:07 pmYay for Cesar Chavez Day
Julie| March 31, 2008 2:30 pmLast week, Ana discovered during her nightly peek at the aquarium that the fish had died of a disgusting white fuzz that enveloped their entire bodies. Kevin looked it up and learned that it was a fungal infection that took over the gills, i.e. they had been suffocated to death.
I left the room and asked Kevin to scoop out the bodies because my stomach couldn’t handle it. In comparison, the kids handled the deaths of their pet fish just fine, until Alex discovered that there was one last fish still alive. When he was told it probably wouldn’t make it, he took it very hard. Poor kid.
The snails are still alive and well though, and Ana still visits them every night. In a couple of weeks, once Kevin has gotten a chance to clean the tank, we’ll get some more fish. Or who knows, maybe we’ll let ourselves be talked into getting a crab or tortoise.
This weekend we invited some friends over. One is expecting a boy only a few weeks after my due date. She was happy to take our old baby boy clothes off our hands, so I spent some time weeding them to make sure nothing inappropriate got passed along. Like this gem of a vest. I don’t know about you, but “star warm” sounds way too hot to me. I don’t think any baby needs a vest that will keep them THAT warm.
Today was all about me – and Cesar Chavez, I suppose, but mostly me. Kevin and I both had the day off, and he took me out for brunch and shopping. We stopped at the Kiehl’s counter at Nordstrom where I embarassed the saleswoman asking if Kiehl’s made nipple cream. (They don’t.) Then we went to Macy’s because I’ve been so very depressed about my lack of clothing options. Many of my maternity outfits are 10s on the cutesy scale, which was fine back when I didn’t need people to take me seriously. But things are different now. So, despite having only 4 more weeks to go, we got me some new shirts all in the name of workplace effectiveness.
When I started talking about getting a ‘sporty’ car a few years back, I saw it as the final realization of a dream that started when I was about fifteen. My first two car choices were driven primarily by a severe income shortage. The 70′ VW Beetle that was given to me with only 220,000 gentle miles on it and the ’93 Civic VX hatchback which was the first car I actually bought.
These days when I think back to ’93 it’s usually to recall the year in which I met Julie. We got married a year later, started talking about having kids, and rather suddenly I found myself driving an ’00 Honda Odyssey. Now there’s nothing at all wrong with the Odyssey. I still think it’s the greatest minivan on the planet and when I bought it I was very much taken with the idea of carting the family around in a big comfy boat van.
As the kids grew up and started calling it “Daddy’s car” to differentiate it from the Prius which was of course “Mommy’s car” I started to think that perhaps it would be fun to get something a little smaller and more responsive. I missed driving a manual transmission and feeling a connection with the pavement.
Which takes us back to the quest for a ‘sporty’ car and several years of trying to reconcile my new, family-oriented life with my nearly twenty year old lust for something fast and entirely irresponsible. I have read reviews, stared at specs, and created massive spreadsheets. It turns out the main problem I had wasn’t picking a car, it was picking an acceptable level of practicality. All the cars I wanted in my teens were two-seaters or 2+2 at best. Given the realities of picking up the kids after work every day, these cars would end up sitting in the driveway while I slogged around town in the minivan M-F. Then there were the times I swung the other direction and convinced myself that I really didn’t need much ‘sport’ in my sports car to be happy.
K: Well, I’ve picked my new car.
J: Again?
K: Yep. Civic Si Sedan.
J: A Civic?
K: No no, it’s fine, it’s a 5-seater. They’re bigger than they used to be.
J: A Civic?
K: It’s the Si…
J: Your mid-life crisis car will NOT be a Civic.
Well, I’m definitely too old to be having a quarter-life crisis so lets call this a one-third-life crisis. Whatever. I’m fortunate to have a wife who absolutely refuses to back down when she knows I’m being a stupid-head, so she forcibly kept me away from Honda dealerships until I found something better.
Yesterday she bought it for me.
Seats five. 6-speed manual transmission.
Five doors. 1/4 mile in low 14s @101mph.
Room for groceries. Turbocharged 2.3L DFI.
Nice smooth ride. 18″ alloys on multi-link suspension.
Did I mention the five seats? Limited slip differential.
$21,800. 263hp and 280ft*lbs of torque.
When Alex first saw it yesterday he said “Yeah! Daddy got his race car!” and when I picked Ana up from the babysitter today she ran out into the driveway, hugged my car (!) and jumped into her car seat.
This weekend we reached an important milestone in our financial life: we stuck to our credit card budget two statements in a roll! I haven’t been this excited since we paid off all our student loans. Back then it was me wielding the whip that got us there, but I haven’t shown much financial restraint since. Sure, I’ve gone through all the motions of making a budget, but it was just this number in an Excel spreadsheet. Every month I’d pay all the bills and tell Kevin, oh well, we’ve gone over again.
Finally Kevin got tired of hearing that we weren’t putting as much into savings as I’d hoped, so he made it his personal challenge for 2008 to stick to the plan. He started logging into our accounts every week and coloring in a thermometer representing our budget, and during the final week of each billing cycle we’ve been finding ourselves going to extremes to keep from bursting the thermometer. Not that there’s any real consequence to bursting the thermometer. It’s just a fun game.
Speaking of games, Alex drew this impressively accurate representation of Pacman using the pattern editor in Animal Crossing
Over the 3-day weekend we had a Harry Potter movie marathon
One thing I noticed was that Alex watched both Sorcerer’s Stone
With all the lazing around this weekend I experienced the worst leg cramp ever Monday night. My first thought was blood clot (panic!!!) but Kevin assures me I had it this bad the last two pregnancies and rubbed my leg until the pain went away. Also I’m pretty sure my cold is gone and that my runny nose is just due to rhinitis of pregnancy, yet something else I’d experienced the last two times. And finally, I’m back up to +17 pounds, thanks to a huge batch of oatmeal cookies I baked and subsequently ate. (Hey, at least they were made of oatmeal.)
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