Life's burning questions

We were in a store in that sells farm and ranch supplies.

My favorite red-haired 3-year-old noticed a mannequin in the clothing isle. The mannequin was of the bust only.

Red-haired child: Monica, where's her head?

Me: Child, I wonder that myself about a lot of people.

Chicken feet

Note: I'm going through blog posts I have waiting to be published. This made me smile. 

It was to be a short trip.

On Saturday, I bought some harnesses for my Pugs. I bought them a size too big, and I and the Pugs didn't really like them.

I threw my shoes on and planned to be gone about 20 minutes to return the harnesses and get my money back.

I parked my car at the store. I didn't even shut my door when I heard a voice behind me.

"Hi Monica."

I turned around and saw the world's cutest toddlers, dressed in black. Like ninjas (they pronounce it ninyas).

A simple shopping trip turned into an hour-long adventure wherein my nieces climbed into a diaper display, put a package of chicken feet into the cart, and screamed in excitement when I put them upside down, threw them into the air, and twirled them around in circles.

I hate it when people's kids run around stores like little monsters. It turns out, if those kids are related to you, it's totally okay for that to happen.

My objective that afternoon was not to shop. I had already done that a few hours earlier. My goal was to make my nieces smile and laugh as much as possible.

I love those little ninyas (toddler speak for ninjas).

Fancy pants!

This is important.

This is a big deal.

I bought a new tv over the weekend!

Before I provide more details, I'll tell you a few things:

1. If you want to steal it, I'm not going to tell you where I live.
2. It's really not that fancy.
3. It wasn't that expensive.

Now that I've discouraged potential vandals away, I need to give you a few more details. 

I've been without a working tv for a while now. Well, kind of. My old one worked when it wanted to. When it didn't want to, the picture would either shake violently or show up as a single line that was about a millimeter wide.

Stupid tv.

I decided last week I'd had it with my old one. I went to college. I have a degree hanging up in my office. 

If I want to watch a movie, I should be able to, dammit!

So I went shopping on Saturday. In the process, I fell on my butt on the ice (ouch), but thankfully I wasn't carrying my new tv when that happened.

If you want an idea of how I shop for big purchases, this is from a previous blog post of mine: 

They started off by saying that they needed to price every single material used, at different stores. Then they wanted to compare prices, then they needed to spend a while thinking about it before they made a decision.
Um...that's exactly what I would do. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've done this exact thing multiple times. Blog post: http://kansasmusings.blogspot.com/2015/01/on-introversion.html

Anyway, it took a few hours, but I finally made a decision. After some furniture shuffling, I got it all hooked up and ready to go. (And by I, I mean my dad did all of it.)

Cool, I have a tv that works! The best thing of all: It does what I tell it to. When I tell it to change the channel, it does. When I tell it to turn on or off, it does.

And, get this: It has a remote!

Fancy pants! I don't even remember the last time I had one of those.

It's the simple things in life that make me happy. Electronics that follow my directions are one of them.

The interesting thing, I think, is my tv stand. I had to switch shelves, and my tv stand now is an old record player. 

I've loved that record player ever since I could remember. When I moved out of town last time, I took it with me because my parents didn't want it.

How could you not want that? We tore the record part out a long time ago and put a shelf in there. There's a radio, too (that no longer works) and there's some shelves on the bottom, perfect for holding books and DVDs.

The contrast of old and new technology is not lost on me.

It's a beautiful piece of furniture, that now holds a beautiful new piece of technology (that isn't fancy or worth stealing, potential thieves reading this).

Boring.

I mostly love Black Friday shopping now.

A few years ago it was a completely different story.

For a few years in a row, I always volunteered to do the Black Friday story for the newspapers I worked for. I interviewed store managers, eager shoppers and entire families who had a tradition of lining up in the middle of the night to get sales.

Back then I had never gone Black Friday shopping, and I didn't understand the excitement of it.

Then after I stopped working at newspapers, I started going. I mostly just got a kick out of being one of "those people" that I used to interview.

But you know what?

It's kind of fun.

I left my hometown at 3 a.m. Friday and headed to the next town over. A certain hardware store opened at 6 a.m. with some pretty good sales, and I wanted to be there when it opened.

In the meantime, I grabbed Starbucks at another store and roamed around for an hour.

After a few hours of shopping, I came home with a Shop Vac, a sander, and several other grown up things.

I'm pretty excited about this stuff.

Also, being an adult is really boring sometimes.

Life and its annoying little problems.

I haven't been very good at blogging lately.

Being busy is a poor excuse, but I really have been busy.

I've been busy being a judge for a downtown scarecrow contest in my hometown. I've been busy trying to buy last-minute things for my beach trip in a couple of months. I've been discovering and loving a local antique shop that just opened.

There's a table and chairs set I love. Actually, love isn't a strong enough word to describe my feelings for this table and chairs.

They're perfect.

I haven't bought them yet, but if they're still there in January, I'm going to be all over that.

Antiquing is interesting. I can't say I've ever been in an antique store. I smiled as soon as I walked in the door last weekend.

This is my kind of place.

There's a shelf at a big box store that I want, but I can't justify spending more than $100 on it. I dug around the antique store a little bit, and found some suitable replacements for said shelf.

Total cost? Something like $15.

Plus, they had some cool looking old ladders on display as quilt racks.

That idea is brilliant! I've been looking for a quilt rack but I haven't found any I like. I think sticking some felt on the ladder step to protect the quilts from old paint will work out just fine.

There's another problem checked off of my stuff-to-worry-about list.

I also have the problem of having a table with no chairs, so I don't know that I can justify buying another table and four chairs. That still leaves me with the original problem.

Hmm. Life and its annoying little problems...

An adventure

I wrote this a few days ago. Since then I read the babies a book for the first time. It was a riveting story about pumpkins and ghosts. They paid attention until the end.

You have to start them early, you know.

-----

I haven't seen my nieces in a week. I swear they grew about 28 feet since I saw them last.

I spent a lot of time with them last night. Around 7 p.m., I asked my Mom if she wanted to go shopping with the babies.

My parents were game, loaded the kids up in the car, and I met them at the store.

The babies love shopping. We showed them Halloween and Christmas decorations, they laughed at a piece of glittery scrapbook paper I showed them, and one baby grabbed a pink feather boa and held onto it for a while.

Before we left, I changed one baby into a clean outfit. As I was changing her diaper, she screamed at me so hard her face turned red.

Like I told my Dad last night: Shouldn't I get a 'thank you for changing my diaper' instead of screams?

I guess babies don't know how to say thanks. They should, but they don't.

:)