Why I Hate the Dollar Store!

Why did it happen to me? Why? Why? Why?

I am a traditional person. I don’t give into fads, especially expensive fads at that. But I underestimated the power of the addiction, and overestimated my ability to stay out of the danger zone.

It started innocently enough I was at the dollar store. Now let me digress here and say:
I hate dollar stores with a passion. Just the smell of the dollar store is enough to make me run for the door, or not even go in for that matter. My friends make fun of me for not shopping on the cheap, but I stand firm in my beliefs that if a store has a foul “packaged” smell to it; then you ought not be shopping there. I have never willingly entered a dollar store just to “check it out”.

However I was with a good friend of mine who was in need of beading supplies and she thought that paying retail was like pulling teeth out without the novocaine. We went down the crap isle; I mean the craft isle in search of her beading stuff. To make a long story short the magnificent almighty dollar store failed to carry what she was looking for. (If we had went to Michael’s liked I suggested she would have found it there. One for me, zero for the dollar store.) On our way back down the isle I turned my head ever so slightly to the right and I noticed scrapbooking supplies. I decided to pick up a few things for Holly’s birthday. I was there anyway enduring the smell; why not?

That was the moment the evil scrapbooking gods had me and my wallet in their gasp. Life as I knew it changed for ever; $20 to start, after that a million dollars and counting!

I gave Holly her token birthday gift a week before her birthday, and just as I suspected she absolutely went wild over it. But come on it was dollar store crap…I mean crafts. We had to get the “good stuff.” Immediately we jumped in my VW beetle and sped to our neighbourhood scrapbooking store-no crap there, just 5000sq feet of expensive retail supplies, to which I had no idea how to use. We filled our basket with what we figured the essentials to be: a cutter, some stickers, a few pens and paper, paper, paper. $125.00 later we were out of there. We made a promise to each other that we would not become one of those scrapbook people that buy and buy and buy just for the sake of buying. No we would only buy what we needed. We got home and we laid our treasure out on the living room floor.

This part is David’s fault…

David was sitting with us looking at the receipt and looking pale as he scanned the total. He noticed that the shop gave a 10% discount, and he asked if we had received our discount. We had not. It was an injustice that we had to fix at once. In a matter of two minutes we were back at the overwhelming-heaven-of-a-scrapbooking-supply-store. We broke our oath right then and there and dropped another $25 dollars, because everything was “just so adorable”.

I like to consider myself a smart woman and it did not make sense to me to pay retail prices for scrapbooking supplies, so I revved up my ebay account and started shopping for the goods from the comfort of my easy-chair. (*Notice the following statement is a plug for ebay.) If you love to scrapbook ebay is the way to go. You get name brand products at hell of a savings. Go and check it out.)

My obsession runs deeper than ebay. Now I am going to Michaels and I am walking through the scrapbooking isles. Most of the time I stand there trying to figure out what all the contraptions and dohickies are for.

At the present moment I have refrained from making anymore purchases, but I can’t tell you what tomorrow will hold. One thing I know for sure is: I am blaming my new found addiction on the dollar store! I hate those places.

All Good Things (and Bad) Must Come to an End

My second post was dedicated to my crazy scale, and this post will be the same. I actually spend quite a bit of time reflecting on my relationship with my scale. I must admit that I have a dysfunctional relationship with my scale. Whenever I stand on it in my bathroom I promise myself I will not weigh myself for at least a week. However when I wake up the next morning I hear the scale calling to me, “Amy…Amy…come weigh yourself. You have probably lost ten pounds. Come and see.” And like any addict I am back on the scale looking down at the numbers waiting for my fix for the day.

I swore to myself that I would never buy myself a scale, but my pusher (a.k.a. doctor) weighed me on his and his scale and it showed a weight loss of 16 pounds in ten days. From that point on I was hooked. I went out and bought my own, and ever since then I have been chasing that same high I got at the doctor’s office. It even got so bad I became a three times a day weigher. I was hopeless.

Then last week a miracle happened that would force me and my scale apart forever. That miracle was David. No, there was no dramatic intervention or such. It was much simpler. David got on the scale and broke it! (I am laughing…right now, because thank God it wasn’t me. I would have died right there on the spot.) The scale just plain gave out; it split down the center! (Again I am laughing…) Crack…big crack…you should have seen his face; it was priceless.

Thanks to David I have finally not weighed myself in 10 days. I probably will not go out and buy another scale. However I can’t make any promises because I am going to see my doctor (a.k.a. pusher.) in a few weeks and if his scale shows a great weight loss all bets are off. Next time I will buy a heavy-duty-industrial-strength-you-can-weigh-anything-on-it-kind!

Head Over Heals

I can't write that much because I got myself in a bit of a jam.

It all started with a goal to walk to over 100km by the end of August. So far I am 35km done. Yesterday I went out to complete another 10k and took David with me. We were busy talking and walking, which in hindsight may have been a problem for me.

We were in our local high school's parking lot on our way to the track when I tripped over a stone. I flew through the air and my face landed on the pavement. I used my left side of my face and shoulder to skid across the pavement. The good news was I could barely feel the pain, because of the throbbing pain in my neck and the back of my head. I had a sneaky suspicion that the pain was caused by the snap I heard in my neck as I hit the pavement. Normally when I fall I can get up, brush myself, and limp down the road. But this time I could not get up, in fact I could not move. We were afraid that I was seriously hurt, so David called an ambulance. OMG it was so much drama. They had to do the putting on of the neck brace thing, and it was unbearably painful when they moved me to the ambulance. To make matters worse I had to fall on a really hot day; I was so thirsty. They wouldn't even give me ice chips, so I had that gross glue pasty stuff stuck to my lips. To top it off the brace was digging into the back of my head where my migraine was, and they weren't in any particular rush to take it off. I thought this was the worse I have ever felt. I promised when I felt better I would start living life to the fullest. I would never take life for granted. (You know the pain must be bad if you start re-evaluating your life in an emergency room bed.) I finally got pain meds, which made me so sick I started to shake, and had a great desire to loose my cookies. They took a lot of x-rays, which was difficult because I couldn't stop shaking, and I was afraid I was going to barf on the x-ray table. How would that work? My x-rays came back with no neck injuries and I was free to return home.

Now it is the next day and I am feeling a lot better, but I am still feeling a little under the weather.

Only I could cause so much drama with one little rock…

Wagons Ho!

Why do we call it “falling off the wagon”? I decided to internet sleuth, which means I used my normal method. I went to Google and browsed the first page. If the first page did not net results I changed my search words, because who wants to click on more than one page? After all I would be there all day going through page after page and I would never get on with my blog entry.

Let's get back to “falling off the wagon”. I am positive that most of you know where the phrase originated from, but for the very few who don’t I decided to cut and paste YAHOO’s answer:

In the late 1800s, many Americans campaigned for a government ban on liquor (crazy, we know). Those who chose to live the sober life were said to be "on the wagon." Maven’s Word of the Day explains that in this case, the "wagon" was actually a water cart used to hose down dusty roads on hot days. Basically, saying that a person was "on the wagon" was shorthand for "they would sooner climb aboard a water cart to quench their thirst" than have a drop of liquor. We doubt many demonstrated the vow by actually jumping up on carts, but the phrase makes their commitment clear.

Now that you know what falling off the wagon is I know you will understand how serious my situation is. I fell off the wagon. In essence I gave up hose water for a cookie. (I just filled in my addiction.) I have been bumping down a road lined with baked goods for four whole days without succumbing to one cookie. And then I was just looking over the side, and bam I did a face plant into a big chocolate chip cookie.

It was easier to stay away from temptation in the 1800’s then it is today. I am positive there were no on-board-wagon-TVs in the 1800’s, so those folks were not tempted by tantalizing alcohol commercials as they rode down the road getting splinters on their bums. I on the other hand sit in my comfortable chair in front of my television and I am accosted with commercial after commercial telling me to go and buy Pepperidge Farm cookies. (A person can only be so strong.) Another thing that made life easy on them guys back then was the the amount of bars they had to choose from. They probably only had one watering hole they could go to . I on the other hand have a hundred stores that I could drive to in thirty minutes and buy cookies from. You see how my life is so much more challenging? All my whining aside the fact remains I, like so many jumped out of the wagon and hit the ground with a thud.

I am proud of my accomplishment to resist my bakery frienemys for four days. I am shooting for seven this time around. I would be BSing you and myself to say that I am going to stay away from cookies forever. I am never going to be able to do that; unless the Girl Scouts stop selling cookies door-to-door. Instead I am trying to learn moderation.

Some of us are lucky enough to come back on board the water cart with bruises and new determination to stay put this time. For some of us we need all of the above plus a good friend and a rope.

I am going to sign out, go and clean up my bruises, put on some band-aids, and hoist myself back up into the cart. When the wagon stops in front of the bakery next Friday I will be the first one out. Maybe...Probably...Where is that rope?