Sunday Salon: Shopping

I'm not much of a shopper.  Never have been.  But put me in a bookstore and I can outshop anyone, a fact that my husband recognized long ago before we even married when he perfected the art of walking me past mall bookstores as if he didn't even see them.  My kids, heaven help 'em, are the same way, despite protesting that they don't really read that much.  (It's all relative around here and their sense of "a lot" is a bit skewed.)  Yesterday I proved both my non-shopping gene and my helpless in a bookstore gene.

I had to pick T. up from a test yesterday.  The test site was a good 45 minutes from home and that meant that I wasn't going to have time to take him all the way back to the house and then retrace my steps 25 minutes to go to the mandatory dance parent meeting for R.  So not only did I wake T. up for a standardized test at 7am on a Saturday morning, but I was going to force him to sit through a boring meeting.  Luckily I had a little time to kill after picking him up and as we looked for drive-thrus to get him lunch, I also spotted a Books-A-Million.  Ten minutes in there resulted in 5 books for me, 4 books for T., and the one book in a series that R. was missing.  I managed to spend more than 10 dollars a minute.  Willpower?  I don't think we're acquainted.  On the plus side, T. has finished two of the books already and he loved them.

Later yesterday, D. and I went to the annual Mardi Gras party with some of my running friends.  One of my friends works in fashion.  Her husband and I were talking and he asked me if I'd been getting lots of things from Nordstrom's lately.  I must have looked puzzled because he said that a lot of boxes had been arriving  at their place and M. told him not to open any of them (it was his birthday) but that he noticed that Nordstrom's was the return address on most of them.  Apparently they were having an ENORMOUS sale.  I had zero idea.  What I did know as far as sales is that I saved an email telling me that one of the local Books-A-Millions is closing and starting this weekend, everything is 30-50 percent off.  I've been plotting how to get there ever since.  Nordstrom's huge sale?  Didn't even cross my radar nor did I feel a sense of disappointment over having missed it.  Unless it's still going on?  I really have no idea.  But large discounts at a bookstore, even one I have never been to because it's too far out of my usual bubble?  I am all over that and getting anxious that I haven't yet made it there.

For some people, it's shoes or clothes or jewelry.  For me it's books.  Always books.

This week my reading adventures took me into an Italian American family and their tug of war about whether they are going back to visit their ancestral village, into a picture perfect marriage derailed by an affair, and into the life of a daughter who has always sacrificed for others but who desperately wants her own happiness and her own family.  Where did your reading take you?