Last night we took inventory of what we have in the house for presents. We came up short. Most of our Christmas shopping was done online, and as boxes arrived I would put them in the garage. This worked out well enough because I could easily stack boxes and everything was out of the way of young prying eyes.
When it came time to finally begin wrapping, we consulted our master list of who was getting what – only there were a couple of things unaccounted for. Since we did almost all of our shopping online it was easy enough to go back and look at the confirmation emails from the various retailers to see what was ordered. Everything was accounted for – the two presents we expected to be in the stack here were apparently not actually ordered.
This meant I had two major presents to find. This was in addition to a couple of other smaller items that needed to be purchased. Those smaller ones would be easy enough to acquire, and I knew that today I would be headed out to make those purchases. What I didn’t expect was having to go to the lengths I did in order to make additional purchases.
There’s a great toy store in our neighborhood – Top Ten Toys. And as you might expect, right before Christmas it’s packed. Fred Meyer? Yeah, it was packed. And because I couldn’t find what I wanted, it was on to Bartell’s (a local drug store chain). Then Target. Yeah, Target, 2 days before Christmas. My head hurts just typing that out.
One more present needed, and that necessitated a trip to a completely different store, one that I won’t go into here because the recipient might read this post. Probably not because he’s working for UPS and pulling 12 hour days right now, but I’m not going to take that chance.
There were a couple of personal errands I wanted to do but simply didn’t have the time or stamina. There better be enough groceries in the house because I’m not leaving again.
Maybe ever.