The day after Christmas

As I said before, I don't buy much at the 50% off sale. Most of what I do buy that day is food, or stuff that goes with food, that is something that I would buy anyway or something very much like what I would buy anyway, only it is green and red and now marked down.

Like I would usually go and buy lots of Rubbermaid Takealongs. Only Rubbermaid has quit making Takealongs and replaced them with "new and improved Takealongs" which are the same inferior cheap plastic things that everyone else sells, and not like Takealongs at all. So I did not buy any of the old ones, as they are no longer available, and I didn't buy any of the news ones cause even at half price they aren't worth it.

As I have already said, I bought lots of cookies. Not very useful things, cookies, but I like them anyway. I like them a little bit too much. Now I have four boxes of them.

Correction, I now have three boxes of them, as we have already eaten one. But my husband did eat most of that one. When the gingerbread is gone, that will be my fault entirely, but the cake-like cookies are his favorite, and they are half gone now.

I bought three rolls of aluminum foil. So far as I can tell, it is just plain aluminum foil, but as the package had snowflakes it was half price. So I won't run out of foil for a bit.

I found a few more interesting things and called my husband to ask if he was interested. He wasn't very interested in being woke up, even though by that time it was just about eight o'clock anyway, but after discussing the items I put them back on the shelf for someone else to buy.

My husband is one of those rare people who actually likes fruitcake, so I was looking for half price fruitcake, but I didn't find any. After buying a few more regular grocery items that just happened to be on sale, I went home.

I forgot that we were supposed to see the Sherlock Holmes movie, and after hurrying to eat a salad, we headed out again. After the movie, we usually eat the pizza special, but he didn't want pizza as we had just recently had pizza twice. He wanted either chicken wings or BBQ. I wasn't really in the mood for either, but I agreed. We stopped at another store, where we didn't buy much. And then we were back to the discussion of where to eat, and he said that we should decide after we went to the bookstore.

No way. I've been up for hours. I'm hungry. Pick someplace and let's eat.

He passed up both a BBQ place and a wing place and headed for a taco place. And the taco place is fine, except that isn't what he said that he wanted, and I figured he was just going to the taco place cause I didn't sound interested in either of the other places. We can go to one of the other places if he wants to. I had to point out where they were. So we turned around and headed back to the wing place.

And then we get to the wing place, and he isn't that crazy about it. He doesn't want to spend that much on a few chicken wings. Well, that is how much chicken wings cost. He just isn't usually the one buying them, and he didn't realize. So he figures if he's going to spend that much he would rather go to the salad bar next door.

So we go from the pizza place to the idea of BBQ to maybe a taco place to then actually going inside the wing place and then we actually end up eating at the salad bar.

The problem with the salad bar is that I figure if we are going to spend that much money on food, I need to actually eat something. And I end up eating very little actual salad. So it's pasta and tamale soup (never had that one before, but it was good), and a big baked potato with everything on it, and a few veggies on the side, and a couple of desserts.

So then we head to the bookstore, and after that he asked where else I would like to go. As long as we are right here next to a Walmart, I suggest that, thinking he will try to talk me out of it. But he doesn't, and he says that he was going to buy me a skillet anyway. So we go to Walmart, and he does buy me a skillet.

The skillet wasn't on sale or anything, he just bought it anyway. A while back I needed a new skillet, and I kept waiting for the money situation to get better before I bought one, but it never did. So I had to buy one anyway, so I bought a ten inch so that I could just buy the skillet and use a lid that I already had. And then my husband uses a metal cooking utensil on my new non-stick skillet and seriously scratches it, and then I drop and break the glass lid. Which leaves me back where I started, with a scratched up and lidless skillet.

So now he's bought me a new skillet. And he says that he was going to buy it for me for Christmas, but then he wondered if that maybe didn't look right, so he was going to buy me something else, but he didn't think of anything else that didn't seem just as bad. So now he's bought me a new skillet, and we'll see how long it takes for us to ruin this one as well.

While we were there, we found a few more Christmas clearance items. Usually someone buys him chocolate covered cherries for Christmas, but no one did this year, so we bought that. And I bought some cookie cutters, as I might actually be expected to bake some things next year, and I probably don't want to use cookie cutters that I've been using for ceramics class. And then we bought some extension cords, that are useful and needed, but as they are green that makes them half price. I rarely find the extension cord I want in a color that isn't something ugly anyway, so they might as well be green.

So that was all good.

I bought yet another thing of white yarn in an attempt to match something, but again that wasn't it. I guess that I will try again today, but I'm afraid that I'm just going to have to give up on the idea.

Let me explain about the yarn.

I recently tried to get some of my things organized, and my main goal was to get all my yarn together in one place, in boxes, somewhat organized, so that I could at least find what I was looking for and not just assume that I had run out of a color and head off to buy some more.

While I am still missing a few things and feel certain that more yarn and more scarves will turn up later, what I did get organized turned out to be more than seven boxes (big plastic boxes that are the fifteen gallon size or larger) of different kinds of yarn and finished scarves and scarves that were not quite finished as they were either knitted panels that hadn't been joined together to make a tube, or else they just did not have fringe added yet. So I decided that I should use some of this yarn, and that I should finish up these scarves that did not have fringe and such so that I might give them away as gifts, or at least have them ready to go in the unlikely event that someone should want to buy one of them.

No one offered to buy any. Or at least, no one offered to buy any after they heard the price.

So after adding the fringe, I gave away three of them, and then I was making three more to give away. One of them required that I buy all new yarn, cause I didn't have any of that color, the second I had half of the required color and had to buy some more(but it was good to have the yarn organized so that I could see that I already had half of the yarn and didn't buy too much extra).

The third scarf I thought that I had all the yarn that I would need. This was going to be a complicated scarf, to which I would add a bit of glow in the dark paint. I thought that I had about a thousand yards of a white that glowed under black light, about a thousand yards of white that did not glow under black light, and about a thousand yards of black. Not that I needed a thousand yards black, but I did need some. And not that I needed a thousand yards of white that glows under black light either, but I did need some, and also this was the yarn that I would add the paint to, so I would need some for that as well. But the majority of the scarf would be this white that did not glow, and I had a thousand yards or so and was happy that I didn't have to go and buy any yarn for the project, after having bought some very expensive paint and finding most of it would not work as I hoped.

If you have been reading, you might know that after several false starts on the scarf, I have changed the design three or four times, and then in the middle of the project I decided the scarf would be too long and changed it again. At this point I have spent more than thirty hours on the project (not counting false starts and other mishaps), had sore muscles and such, but the end was in sight, and I thought that I would work on it another twelve hours or so before taking it off of the machine, and then I would work on it at least another six hours.

And then I ran out of the main white yarn that I was using. I thought that I had some more of that color (or close enough to it), but when I put it on the machine I thought that it just didn't match at all. And so I have to go out and buy some more that matches it, only there's this little problem of my not having the label and not knowing what kind it is. But it was one of those real big one pound skeins, and I didn't think that there were that many of them out there. And, from the way the yarn was wrapped, I could assume that it was not Red Heart and that it was not Caron either. So I bought Lion Heart Pound of Love, and I bought some other kinds of yarn, just to be on the safe side, Red Heart soft white and winter white, as I thought that they looked pretty close and I was pretty sure that they would not glow under black light.

So I took the yarn home and waited for it to get dark. And I looked at all the yarn under the black light.

I had made a mistake. The Red Heart soft white and winter white did not glow under the blacklight, and the Lion Heart did, but none of them matched the original color. And now that I look again, it wasn't that the original yarn didn't glow under blacklight, just that it didn't glow as much as the other white, as the other white had an almost purple sheen to it even in the daylight.

So I am in the very difficult position of trying to match a yarn that only glows a little under black light, and I'm just having to guess at it while shopping for yarn during the day.

In an effort to match this yarn (that I was originally so happy to use because I wouldn't have to go out and buy anymore of this color), I have now spent about fifteen dollars. Some of this I can return to the store (except the Lion Heart that I had already taken out of the package), but I probably won't because it just isn't worth my time to go and stand in line to get two dollars at one store and three dollars at another store and so on.

I will go out today and look at some more yarn, and probably buy some of it, but after that if it doesn't match I think that I shall have to give up and start all over from the beginning. At least I know now what color yarn to buy that does not glow in black light.