A breeze of other places

2004-04-22 - 9:23 p.m.

I think I just witnessed one of my mom's goldfish having a seizure. Do goldfish have seizures? Poor little guy. It sure didn't look very comfortable. Mostly because if you're a fish and you're jerking around, you're going places. And its tank isn't very big. He kept banging into the walls and the pebbles on the bottom. And the other goldfish who looked decidedly annoyed by the whole situation. Things seem to be back to normal now, though.

I'd pretty well decided that I've spent enough money for a while. No more money spending for me. But I didn't do so well in that department today. Well, first of all I went back to that booksale. I had every intention of only buying the books I really, really wanted and not the ones I only sort of wanted. I was doing pretty well at this too. I resisted the urge to pick up many books and there were many more that I picked up, carried around, and then put back. I had a bunch of books, just as many as I could carry in one arm comfortably, including some that I was going to put back on my way to the register, when I decided I was going to buy what I had and leave. I decided that before I did I would go through the books I had one more time and be sure there weren't any that I could put back. As I was doing this, one of the volunteer worker ladies came up to me and handed me a huge sack saying, "I know you're going to be needing this." I put the books I had in the sack and with both hands free, all my resolve disappeared. I ended up spending almost $30. When I got home I hid the bag of books in my closet so my parents wouldn't know how many more I'd bought. That's pretty bad. I'm a closet book buyer. I'm addicted to used books. I guess there could be worse things.

The other place I spent money today was at Eddie Bauer. They're having a sale, you know. When my mom came home from work she asked me to go with her. Seriously, I wasn't going to go but she wanted to. She ended up buying nothing. I was relatively good and only bought two things. I bought a navy blue sleeveless shirt for about $10 and a big goosedown coat for $20. I really like the coat. It was originally $80, so I guess I got it for a pretty good deal. I figure someday I may get myself up to Seattle and I might need it there. Here in Sacramento there isn't much call for a goosedown coat. Ever.

Oh, plus I spent $20 at Office Whatever on labels for BookCrossing. I'm such a dork. It was $10 for 250 labels or $20 for 1000. How could I pass up a deal like that? Oh, gee, you know what this means? It means I need to buy more books so I can use up my labels! Hee hee...

I don't think I've mentioned this here yet, but while I was in Hawaii, I lost one of my contacts. Yes, one of my relatively new gas permeable contacts. I was standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a huge waterfall and it was windy, see. The wind blew a strand of my hair into my eye. It hurt. I reached up and brushed the hair out of my eye, but in the process managed to brush the contact out of my eye, too. The wind immediately caught hold of the contact and it sailed away over the cliff. There was no recovering that thing. All this happened after I'd been in Hawaii for less than twenty-four hours. So the rest of the trip I spent in my glasses, except while I was snorkeling or surfing, during which times I just wore my one remaining contact. Anyway, today I called up my optometrist's office and ordered a replacement contact. I was quoted a price of $75. Ouch. For one little chunk of...whatever the heck contacts are made out of? I called around to other places for cheaper prices, but they all said that they would only fill prescriptions written by their optometrists. Since I don't have insurance yet, that would add around $90 to their prices right off the bat.

So that means today I spent $155. That's significantly more than the $0 I had originally planned on spending.