shopping | Observant Bystander

Archive for the 'shopping' Category

Weekend update

There’s nothing like a fall jaunt…especially to a wine-infused town like St. Louis and the surrounding area. Did y’all know that we Midwesterners grow some kick-ass wine grapes? Well we do, and I sampled some of our fine wines this weekend. Of course, not to be outdone, St. Louis is also home to Budweiser – The Kind of Beers, dontcha know? And yes, some Bud was consumed. Free Bud. At the brewery tour. Which kicked ass because of the free beer. (Did ya hear that, Reg?)

But I digress…

Here’s the weekend in a nutshell:

Top of the Arch. Went up in the tiny space-age pod. Saw lots of stuff including the curvature of the earth.

Toured the Old Courthouse where the Dred Scott case was heard and decided.

Riverboat tour. Let me tell you, the banks of the Mississippi in the middle of an industrial city ain’t real purty. Highlight of the hour trip was seeing an ammonia barge going down the river. Freaky to see a barge loaded with thousands of tons of ammonia being pushed up the river to its destination.

Lunch at Laclede’s Landing, then oldest part of St. Louis, then on to the Anheuser-Busch facilities for a free tour. Free! Plus free beer! Free!

Last, but not least, we drove over to St. Charles – a fine old town on the Missouri river AND the location of the first state capitol of Missouri – where we did some post-alcohol consumption shopping. I must admit that I was feeling pretty good after the brewery tour, which seemed to loosen up this miser-girl’s wallet considerably. We had a very fine dinner on Main Street at The Little House Winery, where we sat outside in the crispy fall air, warmed by a blazing fire pit.

After that whirlwind day, Mr. Observant and I ended up back at our very nice hotel, where Mr. O had to practically hold me back from crashing a wedding and stealing a piece of wedding cake. Observant really wanted a piece of cake, but it was not to be. Mr. O said I would regret it in the morning. A Hershey’s bar and a coffee did me just fine though, and I promptly fell asleep directly after consuming my yummy chocolate treat. It was all of 8:30pm.

We left Sunday morning and took a scenic drive through the country. There’s nothing like fall color, is there? The trees were at their peak; that time right before they lose their leaves when the reds and oranges and yellows and golds are absolutely stunning. We made one last wine tasting stop in Hermann, at the Stone Hill Winery – home of my most favoritest wine in the whole wide world – Norton. If you like a good, dry red wine, the Norton grape makes a tasty (and reasonably priced) addition to your wine cellar. Observant highly recommends.

On another note – why do we keep fucking with the time? I hate it when we spring forward AND when we fall back. It depresses me to have my circadian rhythm messed with so cavalierly. Let’s just leave it one way or the other and be done with it. That’s my 2cents worth on THAT subject.

Hope y’all had a nice relaxing weekend. I’m slowly making my way through my Blog reader, and if I haven’t been to your place yet don’t fret. I’m still adjusting to the time change.

The Blog of Knowledge is now open

Published September 7, 2007 blogging , children , female wisdom , knowledge , life , love , men , relationships , sex , shopping 6 Comments

What started out as a little joke by Anonymum on my post about my search for perfect hair stylist has now come to fruition. The Blog of Knowledge is now open for business! Anonymum, Red, and me, ObservantBystander are your host bloggers/wise women, and we are eagerly waiting to fill your heads with our vast knowledge of men, life, love, fashion, or just about anything you could possibly want to know. If you have a specific question just burning a hole in your brain, leave it in our handy Questions folder on the site. Answers are guaranteed to be cheeky, smugly written (with no spelling errors!), and possibly even correct! So hop on over and let us dazzle you with the combined wisdom of our 130 years of glorious femaleness. From living to loving and from shopping to sex, the Blog of Knowledge has it all!

It’s a brave new world

Published August 18, 2007 consumerism , overhead , satire , shopping 18 Comments

With Ken gone to Chicago for a weekend of beer guzzling and air show veiwing with his eldest son, I rummaged through the sale fliers and percent off mailers that arrived at my house this week: 15% off at Kohl’s, $5.00 off at PetSmart, $5.00 off at the hardware store. List in hand, I walked out the door at 10am into a sweltering, humidity-soaked August morning, jumped in my car and pointed it in the direction of what I have come to call The Black Hole of Shopping. These days it’s almost impossible to tell one suburban enclave from the next because of their idential shopping areas which feature a few large box-shaped stores that sell everything you need, surrounded by smaller stores that specialize in things like shoes and hair care products and scapbooking supplies. The smaller specialty stores are, themselves, surrounded by fast food joints and chain restaurants like Chili’s and Applebee’s. If you were parachuted out of an airplane and landed in one of these black holes, you’d be hard-pressed to tell which part of the country you’d landed in. “Hmmm, there’s a Home Depot next to a Michael’s – I could be Texas. Or maybe this is Cincinatti…”

After completing the errands to use up my coupons, there were still a few items I needed, so I headed for the mother of all big box stores, Walmart. Like them or not, everybody eventually ends up at Walmart. Yes, they’re responsible for the demise of many local businesses, and they’ve been sued for unfair labor practices worldwide. But where else can the public go to quench their insatiable appetite for cheap goods imported from China? And where else but Walmart can a person buy both a gallon of ice cream, and a trampoline? You just can’t beat cheap variety like that, my friends.

It’s usually not my intention to hit Walmart at noon on a Saturday. I like to get there around 9am, before the dregs of human society have awakened from their long night of boozing and fighting and stumble to the Wally World to replenish their supply of Pampers and Budweiser. But I must admit, a busy Walmart is a fascinating study of people – the crippled, the maimed, the morbidly obese; those with all their teeth and those with only a couple; tired mothers with unruly children, and teenaged boys zombied out in front of the gaming displays. And everywhere there is the clatter of shopping carts, because it is a rule that every Walmart shopping cart must have at least one wobbly, gimpy wheel that will make it seem as if you’re pushing your cart down a cobblestone street. I’ve found the rattle affects my brain in a way that causes me to pick up and consider purchasing objects I have no use for and would normally have no interest in – ceramic figurines shaped like toadstools, or enormous wall clocks set in elaborate wrought-iron designs.

Today’s gathering of afternoon shoppers were what I’d come to expect. I passed one particularly strange looking female whose face looked as if she’d been in one too many bar fights. Sure enough, I heard her mutter to her companion as I passed by “The next time I see that whore, I’m gonna kick..her..ass”, the threat uttered in a voice that sounded like a marinade of cigarettes and Wild Turkey. She looked like she’d probably win, too. Then there was the young couple who were arguing over the relative merits of various toothpastes – she in a too-tight shirt that displayed her ample body in a most unflattering way, he in a dirty tshirt and ballcap (worn backwards, of course). “I told you not to buy that Colgate shit. I gotta have the Crest cause it don’t hurt my teeth so much.” Adding to this symphony of down-home, rural Missouri vernacular was a chorus of wailing children, and parents threatening to give them “a good whuppin’ when we get home if you don’t shut the hell up now.” A voice on the loudspeaker droned out a list of items with newly rolled-back prices, the volume so low I wondered if it was actually some kind of subliminal advertising to “buy more, buy more.”

The cart clattered ceaselessly, slowly driving me mad as I pushed through the throngs of poorly dressed amd gramatically-challenged citizens, my final goal in sight: The check-out line.

shoppin’ with the dog

Published May 17, 2007 Dogs , shopping 1 Comment

There were a couple of letters to the editor today in the Kansas City Star about a recent ban on bringing pets to the City Market. One letter was a complaint, and one was a “thank God it’s over” letter. Need I mention that the City Market is primarily an outdoor food market? After the Brookside Art Fair this year, there were letters complaining about the large numbers of people with dogs at the art fair. OK, call me Dr. Scroogelittle, but I don’t want to spend an afternoon at a crowded art fair, where in addition to maneuvering through throngs of people I also have to dodge their dogs and try to avoid having my sandled feet bathed in dripping strings of dog slobber. Ditto for the City Market.

I for one don’t think dogs really belong in places where people are shopping.

I came to this conclusion after my one and only foray to Petco with my dog Coco. It’s where the pets go, you know. I go to Petco when there’s more than cat and dog food on the pet needs list and I’ve seen lots of folks there with their dogs. Looked pretty cute and maybe just a little fun, so one Sunday morning a few weeks ago I decided to take Coco on a shopping trip, primarily to assuage my guilt for not taking him for enough walks lately. As soon as I got the leash out, Coco’s little stump of a tail started its Happy Wag and believing we’d soon be taking a long awaited walk so he could pee on a myriad of bushes, he assumed the position to have his leash put on. However, after a few minutes of driving he began to realize that I was not taking our usual route to the park. I imagined his little doggie mind sadly revising his thoughts from wiggly anticipation to ho-hum resignation that we were simply going on a boring car ride where he wouldn’t be able to pee on one single thing. We pulled into the Petco parking lot and I let him out on his leash. Immediately, his canine nose sucked in a veritable amusement park of olfactory delights. There were dogs here. Lots of dogs. Sweet glory, I must pee on something immediately.

Coco is a champion pee-er. During hot summer walks when I don’t think my mouth could muster up one more drop of saliva, Coco’s little body just keeps cranking out the pee. It’s truly remarkable to see such a small animal urinate so much. I could probably rent him out to farmers in drought affected areas as a mobile irrigation unit. So by the time we walked across the Petco parking lot and got to the front door of the store, Coco had already peed on about 10 different things -grass, bushes, car tires, and both corners of the building. Unfortunately for me, this shopping trip was going to require a cart for the litter box supplies, cat litter, and pet food I needed to buy and I very quickly discovered that trying to wrangle a cart and a dog on a leash who wanted to pee on everything and smell every square inch of the store floor wasn’t going to be a walk in the park (pun intended). Instead of a blissful retail experience with my pet, I found myself manically flinging the needed pet supplies into the cart while trying to keep Coco from peeing on the display items.

Petco has little clean-up stations all around the store so you can be a good shopper and wipe up your pet’s “accidents”. Accidents my ass. Dogs don’t just accidentally pee on stuff, they do it on purpose and so far I’d been able to yank Coco’s leash at just the right time to halt any marking activity inside the store. We made it to the checkout line with our cart of supplies a mere five minutes after walking in the door. That’s pretty much a record for me in Petco because the myriad of pet supplies tends to lull me into a full-blown shopper stupor. I can spend a long time looking at all the cutesy pet do-dads and marveling over all the different things offered for so many different kinds of animals. Not this time though. I couldn’t wait to unload the too-big cart, pay for my shit and get myself and my pee machine out of there. Of course, being Sunday morning, there was only one cashier and a line of people so we ended up waiting in line about twice as long as it took to toss cat litter and pet food into the cart. I allowed myself a moment to relax, closed my eyes and took a cleansing breath. Upon opening my eyes I noticed that in my 30-second period of Zen, Coco had peed on the inconveniently placed dog bed display right next to the check-out line.

I ignored it. And besides, there wasn’t a doggie accident station nearby and I was damned if I was going to lose my place in line to traipse around the store to find a wipey-thing to clean up a little mess in a place where they not only let you bring your dog – they encourage it.

Well, that will be the last time I take Coco shopping. I don’t know what I expected anyway – a meaningful discussion with him regarding clumping vs. non-clumping litter for the kitties? Or whether he preferred to stick with Kibble ‘n Bits or make the switch to the heart-healthy Beneful product we’ve been seeing on TV. No, it seems to me that pets belong in the park, not in the parking lot. Or in the store. And I’m now feeling an aversion to going back to a store where dogs have probably peed on every conceivable surface below knee level. The way I see it, if you invite pets into your store, there’s bound to be trouble.

Petco, it’s not where I really want to go. Anymore. At least not with my pet.