my baby is a cowboy ....

the husband bought a truck.

sooooooo soft!

i just had a nice experience with an online shopping company! i once bought a set of towels which were made from bamboo -- they are sooooooo soft and have become my favorite towels. so i went online to see if i could find more (they're kassatex) and i ended up at cassadecor. so i ordered a set and while i was at it, i ordered a set of sheets (because they were on sale) which were also bamboo, plus some pillow cases.

the box arrived today -- all seven things. PLUS an eighth! i thought, oh no -- they accidently got something else in my order, and then worried about needing to contact them and tell them about it. as it turns out, when i was unfolding and clipping the tags off things, i saw that the two pretty little kitchen towels which i hadn't ordered were a gift from the company for shopping with them!! well! how nice! and you can bet i'll shop with them again! here's the link to the wonderful towels.

i think it's in ontario

say you were eating at a shopping mall and music broke out ..... (thanks, sister-in-law!)

back home

our little vacation was very nice and just the thing to relieve tension and stress. the 100-year old house we stayed in was decorated beautifully, but i was displeased by several things (soap container in downstairs bathroom was almost empty, overhead light in downstairs bedroom kept not working, there were no pans in the kitchen -- skillets, but no pans -- plus a few more things) so i would not recommend it; i mean after all, the owners in the multi-million dollar house next door weren't as giving and conscientious as the place we stayed last year or the year before, so phooey on them. the girlfriend didn't have the objections i did, but hey.

we spent time in anacortes and found a FABULOUS restaurant called ADRIFT. if you're ever in anacortes, for god's sake you need to stop there and eat. the place next door was also supposed to be very good -- gard-a-deli or something like that, but we didn't have a chance to stop there.

the library in anacortes is thriving and is open every day of the week. our library has truncated hours and isn't open in sundays, so i was jealous of the anacortes libray.

we drove down to oak harbor (kinky downtown area) and again found a good eating place -- seabolt's smokehouse seafood & deli. that's where i found the three micro-brewery beers, in cans (from colorado), that i brought back to the hubby. i don't drink but the husband offered me a sip and i thought the scotch ale was particularly tasty. we drove on south through coupeville and freeland, then headed back to the beach house.

we got there on monday and explored anacortes, stayed-in on tuesday and read all day since it was grey and dreary, went out and played in sunshine on wednesday, then packed up and played in sunshine on the way home on thursday.

we stopped at the coop in mt vernon where i transferred the girlfriend to her hubby. i also picked up some sticky rice and checked out the boobies of one of the checkers. she had tattooed landscapes from several beloved places she had lived as she was growing up. it was colorful but strange in the extreme and i was reluctant to stare and observe her statement, since i'm not a man (girlfriend's husband got the story).

we had gotten our flu shots, which we try to do when we're out in late september, a pretty good haul of used books, got caught up on family and problems, and ended up having a really great time! yay, girlfriends!!

foot comfort

i love haflinger's shoes. they fit my foot perfectly, i can wear them all day, and they're beyond comfortable. the only drawback is that they're so hard to find online. zappos doesn't carry them and neither does planet shoes, both sites of which do carry brands i consider. the one fairly reliable source i've found is dodds shoe company in laramie wyoming. yeah, i know, who'd have thought. but they carry a number of sought-after brands and if you're searching through zappos and planet shoes, remember to also check out www.doddsshoe.com. especially if you're looking for haflinger!

one-stop shopping

i didn't know about this website! either there are too many things to know in this world, or i am sadly out of the loop. probably too many things .....

anyhow, there's a dearth of navy shoes out there. they're just not readily available. but with this newly-discovered website, i can search by color and voila! there are 494 pages (12 per page) of blue shoes!!! admittedly, a lot of them are astonishingly horrible ... i mean ... godawful ugly, uh ... i mean, uh ... mmmm ... interestingly fashionable, so it's really a kick just to look through them. but by the 65th page i had seen two pair that i wanted to look at closer.

and, let's be real, i pass over the ones for $595 (as well as the ones for $20) but it's helpful to see them all.

i''m going to put this on my favorites!!

hahahaha, blechk, hahaha ...

since i do all except grocery shopping online, i get a ton of catalogs. a lot of them i just throw away since they don't have the slightest thing i'm interested in. some of them i look through, then throw away. some of them i decide to order from.

and then there's the ones i look through and shake my head over. this latest catalog has the following interesting items for your consideration: gun cufflinks, 18k gold, $5,590; natural shell cufflinks, $1,475; leather-topped bed steps, $675; pair of dresden peacock urns, $9,500; 8x10 enamel picture frame, $325; fake fur throw, $1,750; crystal lamp, $425; alligator earrings, $2,150; diamond elephant pin, $10,500. sorry, i can't go on ... between laughing and getting ready to throw up, this is too much.

cattle logs

i do all my shopping by internet catalogs. it's easier and faster and saves gas. sure, there might be some things i decide to send back, but a number of places have no shipping charges coming or going; for others the return shipping is a minimal charge.

my number one shopping choices are orvis and llbean. i also order a few things from the vermont country store and occasionally from planetshoes and zappos (which i heard about from a paperback book i was reading!).

i tried ordering from appleseed's. i have had nothing but trouble with them. yes, they have some nice clothes, but the aggravation isn't worth it. i won't be ordering from them again.