Saturday, November 2

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

Not a bad day, weather wise. Sunny and a bit above freezing.

My sweetie and our friend got the sheets of plywood down onto the floor joists for the addition. We can now insulate underneath this platform to keep the basement warmer.

I put together a simple lunch for them of naan bread and hummus and veggies.

I managed to clean up the kitchen, clean up in the sunroom a bit, water the plants, do the chores and pick up pony poop in their corral, and get the little goat outside before we went to the city for a while.

We went mainly to get some turtle food; we've really only found one large aquarium/reptile store in the city that sells it in large containers anymore. Most of the pet store chains sell turtle food in ridiculously small quantities that are pretty expensive at those sizes. I love going to this big aquarium store because they have several gorgeous display tanks set up that are like a free pass to the zoo.

We perused a furniture store that my sweetie said afterward was catering to the East Indian population in the city. It was interesting that though the furniture was nice looking, and not like "traditional Eastern" furniture, it was indeed different looking furniture. I liked several items, though they wouldn't work well with cats.

Then we went to an interesting clothing clearance store. It was truly bargain basement. I've never been to a store where the clothes are just literally in big cardboard boxes, unsorted. Some were hung up and organized. There was also shoes and some electronics and such, but mostly I looked at the clothes. I did find a great pair of jeans and a merino wool sweater for very cheap, and my sweetie found a merino wool shirt, the kind of silky sports material. I was kind of surprised that the clothes were pretty nice, not really cheap crap (though a lot that was just not to my taste). Some of it was cheap, but not awful, and it was mixed with nice things. It wasn't easy to find something in your size in the bins because it wasn't sorted, but it was okay if you looked on the racks. It may have been a bare warehouse style, but it was clean, and the clothes weren't all wrecked or anything. If a person had time to shop this way, you could find some neat stuff. I don't think I could ever pay full price for some of the nice jeans that I've found in thrift stores, or clearance stores. Not when I'm used to paying less than 25% of the new cost.

It does freak me out, to confront the sheer volume of stuff being consumed. I freak out when we go to a big mall and you think about the sheer amount of clothing being sold (since that seems to be something people consume a lot of, and the turnover is high. A lot of people only wear things a few times before tossing it or passing it on.) Same with all these huge stores. Walmart, Home Depot, all these dishes, pots, towels, sheets, pillow, socks. When you think of what's in a Walmart store, imagine that everything there will be sold in a few months and replaced with more comsumable goods. That's one store. We're monsters.

I'm grateful that my little brown goat seems to be comfortable yet. I'm grateful that she's used to being handled, and is dealing with being separate from the other critters well enough.