Recently in Shopping Category

My oldest daughter's birthday is coming up again in a few months as well as the rest of the family and I am trying to make a list of the gifts I need to buy, including the stuff for Christmas.

We have an extra television in the playroom upstairs that the girls often use and I am seriously considering picking up a used PS2 off of eBay for her birthday. They are still playing on a Gamecube downstairs.

Normally what I will do is try and wait for the next generation of game consoles to be released before I buy one. I stick to this with computers as well. It allows me to save quite a bit of money because even though the equipment is still very good, it's cheaper because of the newer stuff on the market.

Want to win a $150 gift certificate? It won't be in time to buy a Christmas gift but it would be right on the money to get yourself something for being a good little boy or girl...

I would probably enter the contest myself but since it's my brother AND I already have a copy of the darned book there might be issues there :(

All you have to do to enter the contest is to buy a copy of Republic:

Buy yourself a copy of the book by December 23rd and email the receipt to Charles Sheehan-Miles (you can get his email address from the blog entry) and then go write a review of the book at Amazon. Simple, no? It's a damn good book and just the thing to stoke your big brother fears!

When you purchase the book and write a review that's worth one entry and when you buy a copy for someone else as a gift that's worth TWO!

He will do a video drawing on Christmas Eve and have it posted with the winner by midnight that night. If you are going to enter you had better buy the book early because most likely he will be at my house for the holidays and I don't want to be up filming at dark-thirty and then have to get back up...

The link?

Oh yeah, the link to his blog entry is here and the gift certificate is for either Amazon.com or iTunes, your choice.

I don't know what it is about watches and other gadgets but I love them. I could wear a different watch every day and never get tired of it and with the exception to some of the digital stuff that's coming out, USB watches, watches with mini-hard drives and flash memory, the technology hasn't changed much over the last couple of hundred years. Maybe that's because when something works right, they did right and didn't try to fix it. Luminox watches are pretty cool. I wouldn't mind getting one of the military watches that they carry or maybe the Chronograph watch. It's pretty sweet.

I just have too much going on tonight. There are several things I want to write about but I have been amazingly glued to the television this evening. Watching Burn Notice right now, it's a two hour episode.

After our normal Thursday meeting I had to drive to the car parts store from a friend that I work with and pick up a Dodge Charger accessory for her. The car is great and is the one that I want when I finally do get a new car.

Once I got home this evening I had to cut the grass as we are having a party on Saturday and I wanted to make sure everything looks nice. Thus the lack of posting tonight.

One of the things I used to truly hate shopping for was cordless phone batteries. For some reason it was really difficult to find a replacement cordless phone battery for the model that I had here at the house. I never have any problems finding them for work but for some reason I always ended up having to order it for the one here at home. The point is pretty much moot now since all I keep are my cell phones, but it was a pretty major deal at the time.

I have a few more minutes before I need to start packing and am still venting. The last couple of days at work were so long that I have not been able to most nearly as much as I generally like to.

We may do a bit of Christmas shopping while we are in Beaufort. After family day tomorrow the boy has to go back to his barracks and that leaves us with a bit of free time. One thing I probably won't be shopping for that we have a plethora of is plush animals. The girls have a ton of those so if anyone feels the need to buy them I hope they are really neat ones that can replace some of the ones they already have.

The girls are going to a friend's house early this evening for a play date and the wife and I are going out for an early dinner. Woo hoo, a date! I think we are going to go to a place called Gabe's in Villa Rica. I've never been but I have heard a lot of good things about it. I need to stop at the store as well while we are out. The wife has been working as hard as I am since school has been back in. Since she has a new department head she has taken on a lot of it herself. The lady that they picked has less experience and less knowledge than anyone else in the department so I'm not sure why they gave it to her. I think it's a discrimination thing. Anyway, since she's been working so hard I thought about getting her some nice bath salts to relax with. Dead Sea Salt is supposed to be really good and although I'm not the kind of guy to take smelly baths and all that, I have to admit that every once in a while it's kind of nice to relax in a bath with all that stuff in it.

Now that the summer is starting to come to a close it's time for me to start shopping for Christmas. Last year I ended up hitting the stores in person and that was a big mistake. The best Christmas gift idea I ever had was to start shopping online a few years back and that is normally how I get it taken care of. I think last year it was just because I had limited funding until shortly before the holidays and by that time it was too late for me to get anything shipped to the house without paying exorbitant prices.

I mentioned a while ago that the wife and I want to redo our master bathroom. One of the things I want to do is to put in marble countertops, but we would also like to have marble or tile flooring as well. This is one of my ideas for the walls in the bathroom.

This Iridiscent Black tile is sold by the Glass Tile Store and comes in sheets of 12" by 12" mesh backed sheets. We have thought about making it sort of a sea shore motif in there and this tile would fit perfectly. I wouldn't mind having something like this for the kitchen backsplash as well, but perhaps in a slightly lighter coloring.

The Glass Tile Store has all kinds of tile for walls, kitchen backsplashes, bathrooms and even for the swimming poole. All of their prices are below wholesale cost and they ship everywhere in the United States as well.

I don't know what the kids were thinking but when they put the dishes up last night I think that one of them shoved something in one of my posts that just didn't fit and had to force it. My pots aren't particularly heavy and now one of them is split right near the handle and leaks if you fill it up too much. I hate having to go out shopping for household stuff like this. I may end up picking up a new post at berndes cookware. They seem to have some nice stuff and I would never have to leave the house then.