We've been in need of some new bookshelves for some time, and on Sunday, we piled into Matt's mini-van and went out to get some. The bookshelves we have now that work best are do-it-yourself modular furniture from Rose's, so that's where we went first. Rose's wasn't open just yet - I can never remember if things are going to open early or late on Sundays around here - so we doubled back to stop at the Staples.
I was going to pick up a pad of graph paper and see if they had the hard covers in stock for my Palm. And, since they carry office furniture, we thought we'd see what they had in the way of bookcases.
We have this problem with Staples, and why I keep going in there, I don't know. Every time we go in and find something on display that we want - I'm talking items over $50, here - they never have it in stock. Never. When I went shopping for a PDA, the one I chose wasn't in stock. When we went shopping for a color printer, the one we liked best wasn't in stock. It's gotten to the point where it's almost a game - we try to see how absurdly mundane the item can be.
So anyway, we wandered through the store. I couldn't find the graph paper, and we ended up over by the furniture. They had a bookcase on display that was not only just as good as the model from Rose's, but even better, by dint of being on sale and having five shelves instead of four. We looked it over admiringly, then talked about getting Matt an office chair, and picking up a filing cabinet. I had to walk all the way to the far corner of the store to attract a salesperson's attention. Go on, guess...
They didn't have it in stock.
Oh, well, we said. Guess we'll go to Roses after all. I went and looked for my Palm hard case, and they were...
Well, yeah. And that's only a $30 item! I thought about getting a generic hard case, but it was so bulky it would have made it hard to fit the Palm in my purse, so I decided against.
So we drove back over to the Roses, which by now had not only opened but acquired at least four thousand cars in its parking lot. We went in, talking about finally buying a real ironing board as long as we were there... They had little short two-shelf bookcases, and curio display cabinets with glass doors, but not what we were looking for.
We went to K-Mart. K-Mart didn't even have short two-shelf bookcases. Just entertainment centers.
We went to Target. Target had short two-shelf bookcases. But no tall four- or five-shelf bookcases.
Maybe it's just as well. If any of these places had had what we were looking for, then we'd have given in to our urge to make impulse purchases, and we'd have wound up with graph paper, an office chair, a filing cabinet, a Palm hard case, an ironing board, and a new super soaker, and I don't know how we'd have fit it all in the van.
Matt decided, since we'd liked the bookcase Staples didn't have, and since they at least had one to display, he'd try to order bookcases from Staples' website. He found the two bookcases on the website that were six feet tall and had five shelves. One of them was only eighteen inches wide, so we nixxed it, leaving us with what was probably the same model we'd seen in the Staples store.
He called me in to select a color. He typed "2" in the quantity field, and clicked on the "Add to Shopping Cart" icon...
An error message popped up to the effect that they didn't have this in stock.
Luckily, this turned out to be an error brought on by a lousy shopping-cart program. When he attempted to add the bookcases one at a time, it went through just fine. So we should have our bookcases by the end of the week.
And they'll be good, damn it.
We went on Monday to see Mission Impossible 2 with K.T. and Kevin. Those of you who know me well know that I'm not really the biggest fan of action movies. I will only go to them if they're also comedies, or have actual plots. But the Mission Impossible series is well-known for bucking the spy/action tradition by actually having well-thought-out plots. I'd enjoyed the movie a few years ago immensely.
Friends warned me last week that this movie hadn't really been done in the traditional "intellectual action" vein - that it bore far more resemblance to James Bond than Mission Impossible. Well, I like James Bond movies too; I'm a sucker for eye-candy and gadgets, and as long as I know what I'm getting into, I won't be too disappointed.
So, if you think of this movie like a James Bond movie, then it was pretty good. Explosions and gadgets and vehicle chases and sex and fistfights and underground fortresses... Fun, in a brainless kind of way. But if you're expecting a Mission Impossible intellectual, stay home.
I bothered the hell out of poor Matt. I have this tendency during action movies to be suddenly struck at random moments with the sheer ludicrousness of it all and start giggling. Usually during overchoreographed fight scenes. During the car chase, they showed us at least three times that a bad guy had Ethan lined up exactly in his gun's sights, and then he missed. The phrase that kept running through my brain was, "Only imperial stormtroopers are so precise."
Oh, and a note to the directors and producers: I'm sure Sony paid well for their product placement, but that digital camera looked pretty crappy next to the other gadgets. You should at least have come up with a smaller body for it and slapped Sony's name on it. Here's a clue, guys: The people familiar with the technology want to see something cooler than what's already available. The other people are going to be impressed by just about anything, or else don't care at all.
Actually, I liked the movie. It was rather longer than it needed to be, and had some plot holes, but I feel that way about just about every action movie. I just hope the next one is up to the Mission Impossible standard.
Word of the Day: cozen - to gain by artful coaxing or tricky deception
I was so damn clever. We needed boullion. We were out, we needed some. And I'd been simply craving some tortilla chips. Not just any tortilla chips, though - Tostito's Hint of Lime chips. For days, I'd wanted them.
So I cooly decided Sunday afternoon to slip out to the grocery store for the boullion and - not incidently - the chips. As I was pulling out of the neighborhood, a thought struck me: the latest grocery-store item that our usual grocery store has stopped carrying just because Matt and I like it is a certain kind of popcicles. Edy's lime popcicles, to be precise. We like them because they're actually sour.
I figured, in order to cozen Matt into not giving me a hard time about the chips, I'd wow him by going to the other grocery store down the road and picking up a box or two of our favorite popcicles.
It almost worked. The other store did have the popcicles, and the boullion... But not the chips. Damn. I bought what I had anyway, and went home.
So Monday, doing the grocery shopping, I decided I wouldn't bother trying to be subtle. I'd just go buy the darn chips. I walked down the snack-food aisle... No Hint of Lime chips. Aaaah! They've been replaced with Hint of Roasted Red Pepper! Aaaah! No good! I hate peppers! Aaaah!
That's what I get, I guess, for trying to be tricky.
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