Post Christmas Shopping

My Mom was still here today and had taken Quinn on a walk around the neighborhood. While they were gone we took Catherine with us out into the shopping arena. Today was my first foray our into the post Christmas Shopping arena (I'm not counting my search and destroy mission to Home Depot for the plumbing supplies), and I have to say, I didn't like it. Sure, Hallmark was amusing enough, grabbing up ornaments I would never buy at full price for close to half off. Although, really if I didn't care enough about the ornament to buy it before, I don't know why I'm buying it now (and I felt absolutely no desire to pick up the Locutus of Borg ornament even at a discount). Anyway, we bought some ornaments for the kids. We got the mini Rudolph ornament for Catherine. We also got her the Curious George: Paint Me Curious Ornament, but when we got home, we saw it was already on the tree. Oops. For Quinn we got a John Deere Tractor ornament and a Disney Chicken Little ornament. We've already had the Chicken Little Ornament get a broken leg as Catherine was having him 'walk' across the table by banging him. For the record, you shouldn't use the glue for pvc pipes to repair ornaments. Apparently that's pretty strong glue and the colors will run (I'm not going to go into details on how I know).

After Hallmark, we went to Border's Books. I've decided I don't like Border's anymore. Actually, I'm not sure I ever liked them, but now I have something I feel is substantial enough to back up my gut feelings. You see, the whole reason we went out shopping today was to go to Border's. As you may recall, my purchasing of gifts for Ginger was somewhat, shall we say, lacking. One of the items I had been instructed to procure was the new Diana Krall CD in which she covers holiday songs called "Christmas Songs." Of course, I totally forgot to get it. But I had looked online for it on Christmas Eve and saw that it was in stock at Border's Books just down the street. I checked again this morning and sure enough, it was still in stock. And I checked again from within Border's at one of their kiosks and it said it was in stock. But I couldn't find it. I found the poster of the album cover. But no album. So I had to resort to something I'm usually loathe to do, I asked for help from an employee. After going to the kiosk that I had been at earlier, and pulling up the same info I did, the employee went to the same place I had already been, and looked around and couldn't locate it. After a while of this (we went to another location of holiday CDs I had also looked at earlier and didn't find it there either), the employee went and asked some other employees. Turns out, they think they're out and haven't had it for over a week. I asked why they were still advertising that they had it then and got no answer. Now, I realize this person has probably no way of impacting what shows up with inventory stuff on the web. But the one employee that apparently knew something said that there had been a bunch of other people asking for the CD also, you think at some point someone might have changed the old "Available in Store" boolean flag for that item to false. And then they asked me if I would like for them to check the computer to see if another store was carrying it. When I asked why I would trust any answer they would give me since this store claimed to have it, they didn't have a good answer, but then decided they could actually call the other stores and have them check. At this point, I had already found a Star Trek New Frontier book I wanted and found a new Enya CD that I had been unaware of, so I decided I would just not buy anything, go home and order it all online and get like 20% off the price and free shipping. As I was in the process of 'storming' out (by way of the register so Ginger could buy her three Dr Suess buy two get one free books) I did notice though that the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection is out. Have to admit, that looked like something I would like have one day.