Ha!
Mom mentioned that she'd like to go with me to Target and to the Bed, Bath, & Beyond that's right next to the Target. I was fine with this plan, but it meant we had to ditch my grandparents - specifically, my grandmother - first.
I've hated shopping with my grandmother since I was a little kid. My grandmother loves to shop. I hate it. I don't like being on my feet for long periods of time, and I never have. When I was little and I was forced to go shopping with Grandmom, I'd wind up with these little stumps at the end of my knees instead of calves and feet. I'm sure Grandmom's extensive shopping trips explain why, when my father is six feet tall, and my mom 5'7" I'm only 5'4". She can't just go to the store and buy something - she's got to go to every store that could possibly carry the item she's looking for to compare price and quality. She'd make me buy the sort of expensive sheets we got as wedding presents instead of the cheap sheet sets that they sell at Target. (Don't look at me like that. Matt and I have two sheet sets that we rotate on our bed, and one of them is a cheap set from Target. Just because they're inexpensive doesn't mean they're not good enough for our guests to sleep on.) To make matters worse, she's pretty old now, and moves with the care and precision of an old person being very careful. So I'd be on my feet even longer as she dragged us all over town.
Obviously, we couldn't take her with us.
As luck would have it, my grandparents had promised my dad for Christmas to buy him a new tent. (This falls under the category of creative wrapping - a box with a handful of candies to make it rattle, a picture of a tent clipped from the newspaper and a note promising to buy one. It also falls under the category of convenience - a tent would have been hard for my grandparents to lug all the way from Texas, and they're hard to wrap.) So all Mom and I had to do was wait until they'd left on a tent-finding mission.
This wasn't necessarily cruelty to my father - Grandmom knows practically nothing about tents, so Dad could have told her that he'd already researched the possibilities pretty carefully and settled on the one he wanted.
So we waited. And made small talk. And waited. And made small talk more loudly so we wouldn't have to keep repeating ourselves.
Finally, driven to impatience, Mom asked Grandmom if she'd still wanted to stop in this knick-knack store in the area. (My grandparents used to live only a few blocks from my parents.) Grandmom agreed, and they began the long, slow process of getting ready to go out. In the meantime, we casually slipped in some things, and it was settled that after we'd all gone to Chelsea's (a combination Hallmark and new age crystal twinkie store) we'd split up, and Mom and I would go to Target while Dad took the grandparents on an errand to the drugstore and then tent shopping.
Mom and I puttered around in Chelsea's, and I actually picked up a few things - some neat candles to burn at our New Year's party, and a very pretty crystal twinkie suncatcher that cost more than it should have.
Grandmom didn't look very happy that she wasn't going with us to Target and Bed Bath & Beyond, but we escaped anyway.
First we stopped in a party supplies store, where I picked up some more things for the New Year's party - napkins and plastic champagne flutes and such. Then we went to Bed Bath & Beyond, where I looked but didn't find anything I liked, and Mom picked up about five rolls of wrapping paper on sale. It was nice paper - if I hadn't just bought four brand new rolls before Christmas, I'd have grabbed some myself.
Then we went down to Target, where I finally found a decent sheet set, and an addition for our CD rack, and a couple of videos to replace the duplicate Bug's Life my folks had gotten me for Christmas.
And that was just about all the shopping I could stand for one afternoon. Luckily, my mom and I are pretty similar when it comes to shopping, and so having accomplished our missions, she smoked a cigarette while I brought the car around, and then we went home.
Dad and the grandparents were still out. Poor Dad.
Mom invited Matt and I to join them tonight for dinner out. Since they're going to Samurai, which is a pretty good hibachi place that Matt and I can't afford very often, we're definitely going. (Oh, we'd probably go even if we were going to my grandfather's favorite place, which is Western Sizzlin'. I love my grandparents. They just drive me crazy.)
But thank goodness, I have the day at home - no shopping.
I'll spend a fair amount of tomorrow morning home, too - I discovered a slow leak from one of the pipes under our toilet yesterday (the incoming pipe, thank goodness, not the outgoing) and called the plumber this morning, and they're sending someone up tomorrow. "Between 8 and noon, but probably closer to 8." Which means I have to be up and dressed by eight, but I might not see the guy until noon. Joy. Oh, well. It's a very slow leak - I put a cup under it yesterday morning when I found it and the whole day it only collected about a third of a cup of water. So I'm not in a major rush to have it fixed this instant. But it'll be nice to get the plumber out here - while he's here, he's going to try to figure out why our hot water runs out after only ten minutes.
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