Even After All These Years...

Whenever I finish a roll of toilet paper and come to the cardboard inner-tube, I still think, "I've got to save this for my hamster." I haven't had a hamster in 11 years!

I have re-discovered a lovely, secret (though only a slight bit shameful) joy: thrift store shopping. There are tons of them in Austin. Right around the corner from me there's a Goodwill Blue Hanger Outlet. Which basically means a warehouse full of rows of bins that are full of crap. It's not organized or put together nicely...sometimes there's even broken glass and other things you wouldn't want to touch (lots of shoppers wear gloves as they browse). Everything costs next to nothing, so it is fun to browse and do low-risk shopping. I am a sucker for purses - I have done well containing myself (I've only purchased one). I saw a bulletin board with "Sue" and a flower hand painted across it and thought it was cute. Then I thought, "If Melinda Baustian was with me, would she approve of this shopping decision?" I laughed at myself and left the Sue board in its bin. (It's purely coincidental that Melinda's middle name is Sue).

Then I saw something that I will never forget. The employees had cleared one of the rows of bins so they could bring out new bins with new items. A crowd gathered at the end of the store and it was hard to shop with all the elbows I was bumping up against. There was an invisible line drawn across the room where everyone was waiting for the new bins to be ready. Like the starting line of a marathon or something. Then, like the fire of a gunshot that begins a race, an attendant said, "Alright go!" and it was just like those videos you see at Christmastime, that you can't believe you're seeing, where people turn into animals in a stampede and hurdle themselves forward toward the plunder. The bins were all organized and nice and neat, but once people got their dirty little hands (or gloves) into them, it was all disheveled. Explains the messiness - it's just the crazy shoppers like me.

I was a bit materialistic and bought two scarves for no reason at all other than they were cute.

It's summer!