Ohman… it is morning and I am legitimately typing a blog post like I am supposed to on a weekend! Apologies again for the huge lag in getting yesterdays post out the door. Unfortunately from time to time I get busy… and I really don’t like pre-writing a post very much and setting an embargo date. I tend to keep my blog posts fresh and reactional in that I just blather on about whatever happens to be in my mind at the time. I can tell that this is not everyone’s cup of tea as my subscriber base has pretty much been stable and unchanging for some time now.
I Love my Grandma
The title of this sub-section will make absolutely no sense to anyone… but I am chuckling immensely. Dates back to High School Spanish 2… when I kid pestered me for a translation of what was written on the board. I told him it was “I love my grandma” and I don’t remember what it was honest at this point… only that I told him a completely laughable translation. Sure enough the little slacker got called on to provide the translation, and he proudly strode to the front of the class with all the cocky confidence you would expect of someone who was dead certain of the answer. He delivered his response and immediately riotous laughter spread throughout the room. I just shrugged and said “you should do your own translations from now on, my Spanish is a bit rusty”.
Though I really and truly do love my grandma… and this week was her 84th birthday. We had all intentions of going up on Wednesday night to see her, but for starters my wife got home extremely late from work that night. After calling up she was not feeling great after having oral surgery the day before, so we opted just to talk to her for a bit on the phone and come up Saturday to see her. The above card is me being bored while waiting on my wife and freehanding something with a bunch of sharpies. I thought it turned out fairly well and Grandma seemed to like it.
We went up yesterday and hung out with her for about an hour or so before my parents arrived, which lead us to spend another hour or so catching up with them. She is looking pretty good and my mother took the opportunity as always to take a large number of photos. We have finally weaned her off using a standalone point and shoot camera and just taking photos with her Galaxy S4. Cool thing about that is it let us grab her phone and text the best of them to ourselves. I have to say they are some of the best family style photos we have had in awhile. I would post them, but I am not sure if I am quite ready to post photos of myself online.
Gallivanting
After leaving my grandmothers, we set out on a cross country trip of some hardcore gallivanting. Essentially from my hometown we went over to Bartlesville first. Recently all of the stores surrounding us have had some massive clearance sales, which I think are essentially the “lets clear everything out so we can stock up for christmas” sales. So far we have found all sorts of things, namely school supplies and Legos. Since we really had no plans yesterday we decided to roam around the surrounding area checking various stores… namely all the different Wal-mart super centers.
It has admittedly been a really long time since I have spent much time in a Wal-mart store. Like I will pop in and get ONE thing at a time, that only they carry… but I have not really spent a ton of time “shopping” in one for some time. We saw several funny things along the trip yesterday that I just have to share. Firstly is the image at the beginning of this section. Apparently you can get a wedding set at Wal-mart for around 10 dollars. They are as fake as is humanly possible… but at first glance they totally pass as the real thing. I didn’t even know that was a market, that folks needed cheap fake rings… but apparently like always they are filling a perceived need.
Next up over right justified we have the adult women’s… super girl footie pajamas. Just not the type of thing I expected to exist at all… let along be proudly displayed for sale at the local Wal-mart. The funny thing is they come with a little velcro cape that attaches to the back. The best ones I didn’t see until later in the day at another store, were the batgirl pajamas. I tried to convince my wife to buy a pair. I could totally see her loving a pair of footie pajamas… but she thought they would simply be too damned hard to get out of when she needed to pee in the middle of the night. Probably best to air on the side of caution there.
Half a Tank of Gas
The above image is a screen cap of the route we took yesterday. Nowata to Bartlesville to Muskogee to Wagoner to Pryor to Claremore and finally back to Owasso. We ended up burning through half a tank of gas, and hit a ton of stops between. Did we find much of anything in the grand scheme of things? Not really… but it is mostly the thrill of the hunt. The entire event started in part because a few weeks back we had found all sorts of cool stuff at the clearance section of the Muskogee Wal-mart. I had opted not to pick a few things up, as had my wife and we had been kicking ourselves ever since. So from Bartlesville we decided to head over to Muskogee and see if they still had it.
I have to say we struck out 110%, because not only did they not have what we were wanting… they had zero signs of ever having this massive clearance section in the first place. I wandered around the store trying to find any place it could have gone… but I am guessing more than likely after two weeks they had shipped it all off to be written off by Wal-mart… which is essentially how Sooner Surplus gets all its stuff. While we were in town we ran by there as well, but there was nothing really new to look at, and since we didn’t need mens suit coats or scooters… their newest acquisitions… we went on our merry way. It was at this point we got the brainstorm to meander our way back to Owasso through all the towns along the way.
What was fueling my wife in this endevour is visions of school supplies dancing in her head. Friday night we had to run out to the Owasso Wal-mart for something… and back in the home and garden section they had all of their back to school leftovers piled up in a huge heap and discounted down to truly silly prices. As a result we ended up with 20 index card boxes for 10 cents each, 40 plastic rulers for 10 cents each, 6 packages of her favorite flair clone markers for a quarter a piece, 11 really nice 8 pocket file folders for a quarter a piece, misc notebooks for around a quarter, gluesticks 4 for a quarter, and a really nifty storage ottoman for the loft for 5 bucks. All told we walked away with a massive amount of stuff for less than 40 bucks.
Quality not Quantity
While I did not necessarily find a huge stockpile of stuff in our trip, I did find some definitely awesome items. Friday night at Target I did one of my routine trips through toys to look for clearance, and found they finally marked down the Fury starfighter from Star Wars the Old Republic. This is the one that comes with the Darth Malgus mini-figure and is the same star ship that Sith Inquisitors and Warriors pilot in the game. Of all of the Lego sets that have been on the market, this is hands down the one I have wanted the most. The problem is it debuted for like $120 and there was no way in hell I would ever purchase that. However target had it marked down to $60… so I snapped that puppy up.
While on our whirlwind trip of Wal-mart clearance, I did encounter one really nice thing in Wagoner. When the Hobbit movie sets were released, the on that I knew I immediately had to have was the Unexpected Meeting set that included a model of Bags End. I have always loved Hobbit architecture and the Baubleshire was hands down my favorite area of Everquest 2. So since a Hobbit hole existed… I had to have it. This set originally debuted at around $60, and Wal-mart had it marked down to $25 so it was a completely no brainer to pick it up for that.
So while I did not find a large volume of sets, I got two of the ones that I had been wanting the most, so I call our half tank of gas a complete success. My wife on the other hand picked up a handful of things, included several scarves that she had been hunting for at the Claremore Wal-mart. The thing we keep marveling at is just how grossly inefficient the pricing is. We would see the exact same product on clearance at three stores… and in each case it would be a completely different price. There were several cases where we might have picked an item up at another store… had it been priced the same way it was at a previous store. I remember seeing the same action figured priced for $7, $5, and $4 at three different stores in the clearance bin.
I am assuming this is because each store has a certain amount of autonomy in their pricing practices. However as a consumer, I find it all a frustrating mess. Granted I am likely exploiting the hell out of these practices by hitting multiple stores in the same day and sampling the best prices at each. I just find it humorous that I never see this level of chaos at say a Target, where everything is marked down in a neat and orderly fashion based on a specific patterned schedule. If you see something for sale at one store, you can go to any store in your area and are almost always going to find it the same price.
Wrapping Up
Even though we did not necessarily find a ton of items, we had a fun time wandering around the state looking for things. It was a nice drive, we just wish we had brought our cameras for it. Today on the other hand I hope we pretty much just chill out close to home. My allergies are still killing me, especially after being exposed to that much “outside” along the tip. I am just about to get up and take something, and hopefully that will make things better. I hope you all have had a great weekend and that you have a good start to the work week.