Shopping

My $55 Mistake

I have been wearing the New Balance Men’s Coast V4 FuelCore Athletic Shoe Running since I retired. They are comfortable and I love the slip-on nature of them. You tie the laces until they are snug on your foot and then the stretchy upper material allows you to slip your foot in and out. The first pair of them I bought upon retirement were in Techtonic Blue and I wore them out before 2018 was done. The second pair I purchased was in Phantom Gray (like linked above) and made it to this September. Not bad, a nine month life span, considering I’m averaging 2-1/2 miles a day every morning 5 days a week.

Both previous shoes were bought at Academy Sports. When I replaced the first blue pair I wanted blue again, but they didn’t have it, so I opted for the in stock gray. This replacement time they didn’t have any of that make and model shoe at all. Donna and I hunted high and low looking, but no dice. I wanted a slip on, I am basically that lazy, so my options were limited.

There were about a half dozen slip-on shoes, but of those available only 2 were were nice enough looking that I would put them on my feet. The first pair I tried on was too loose, I normally wear a size eleven and even in a 10.5 they slipped off the heel when taking a step. The next pair I tried were the Skechers Men’s Equalizer Double Play Slip-On Loafer. There was no size 11 available, but they did have a 10.5, so I put them on and walked around the aisle a bit. Not too bad, so we bought them.

It wasn’t until the next day on my walk that I realized I should have test walked them a little more in the store… They were too stretchy and too tight at the same time. My heel felt elevated forcing my foot forward hitting my toes on the front of the shoes. I didn’t end up with any blisters, but I did get a sore arch. I thought I would be alright and maybe I’d get used to them after walking in them for a few mores days. Wrong. On the next day’s morning walk after only a couple of blocks I decided to cut the walk short and head home. It was then that I pulled the badly worn pair of New Balance shoes out of the trash, placed the Skechers in the ‘Going to Goodwill Pile’ and ordered another pair NB Coast V4 FuelCore in Phantom from Amazon.

34,000 Pounds of Thrust

This Friday and Saturday was the 43rd Annual Aiken’s Makin’ Arts and Craft Show. Two rows of tents along three blocks of downtown full of hand made knickknacks, gewgaws, bric-a-brac, trinkets, trifle, baubles, gimcrack, whatnots, thingamajigs, tchotchkes, doodahes and whim-wham. Also about a dozen purveyors of fair food for your dining pleasure.

Because we are people of leisure, we thought a good idea would be to beat some of the crowds and go on Friday, but by the time we did the usual morning stuff it was too hot outside to deal with it. So today we went with Plan B, we walked the 2-1/2 miles up to it, timing our arrival for the official 9:00 AM start. After walking the whole thing and finding absolutely nothing we wanted to buy, except a “fresh” lemonade and an ice cream, we checked out all the food vendors and decided that we would drive back later to get lunch.

Halfway home Donna said, “Oh, I forgot, we were supposed to go to the Indie Arts Vintage Market.” I said, “We’ll do that at lunch. We can even park there and walk the 2 blocks back to Aiken’s Makin to eat.” The vintage market is every other weekend and this one coincided with the big one. After seeing literally 6 blocks full of crafts in the morning we breezed through the market, right until we got near the other exit. Both of us stopped and went, “Cooool!” There was one guy1 there with these vintage cameras turned into lamps. They were sitting on old wooden tripods with an LED bulb in the metal flash reflector.

But the cameras weren’t what we were looking at, it was a couple of Flash Gordon spaceship looking lamps made from explosion-proof light housings and other found metal objects. We just had to have one.


On Monday the Ladybug passed through the 34,000 mile mark.

Happy Memorial Day

Camo Miata

3M makes a vinyl wrap in a digital military camouflage too.

We had a nice holiday off, hope you did too. Started with a nice 4 mile walk in Hitchcock Woods this morning, followed by lunch at the Mellow Mushroom. The afternoon was spent in the traditional holiday manner, shopping. Donna and I both snagged a new pair of sneakers and both bathrooms got new mats/rugs. Oh, and I watched the Red Sox beat the Orioles 7-2 on MLB.tv. Tonight, who knows, maybe a drive in the non-camoed Miata with the top down…

Ship To Store (Act 3: The Final Curtain)

late April…

As part of the kitchen remodel that spread out over nearly the whole house we needed some new living room curtains. We shopped online and found some we like at Lowes. We went to the store and they had them on the shelf, but only in the 84″ length and we needed 95″. To make sure these were what we wanted we bought one panel in 84″ to take home and hang.

We like ’em. I go to Lowes.com to order 6 panels (its a big window) and there are 3 delivery methods, Store Pickup, Lowe’s Truck Delivery & Parcel Shipping. Store Pickup is free. Parcel Delivery is for whatever reason grayed out and listed as unavailable. Truck Delivery is $79!, roughly half the total cost of the 6 panels themselves. Guess which one we “chose?”

A week or so later when we get home from work there are 2 messages on the answering machine. Both are from Lowes, 2 different voices, letting us know our order can be picked up. It was the night of the monthly MMC meeting and this month it was in Aiken, so we decided to leave a little early and pick up our curtains beforehand.

We go right to the service desk as that was how it worked last time. I tell the woman behind the counter, “I’m here to pick up an internet order.” She asks for my phone number and she enters it in the register. She then looks behind her into the cage on the wall. She looks back at the register. She glances at the phone. Back at the cage. The register. The phone. She sighs. She picks up the phone and pages a Mrs. Someone. We wait. She takes a couple steps back and glances at the cage again. A guy shows up behind the counter. She looks at him. She looks at the register. She looks at the phone. Donna corners the second individual and wants to know what is taking so long to retrieve our order. He says he’ll check and off he goes. We wait some more.

The person who was paged finally makes an appearance and we let her know that this is unacceptable. We had two separate calls telling us our order was in, but no one can seem to find it. She apologizes and says, “I’ll go see what is happening.” We wait. The original woman behind the service desk is looking nowhere and especially not at us. I’m so mad at this point if they showed up with the curtains now I might just walk back around to the other side of the service desk that is marked RETURNS and get my money back. Instead we leave the store, leaving who knows how many people looking for our curtains, so we can make the Miata Club meeting.

An hour and a half later we return to Lowes and the woman behind the counter recognizes us and picks up the phone right away. She says someone will be bringing our curtains right out. We wait. Every minute, minute and a half, we would hear a conversation coming down an aisle our way and each time it wouldn’t be our curtains. It took over 5 minutes before they finally arrived. We left very disappointed in the experience vowing to shop at Home Depot from now on. And swearing we won’t ever do the ship to store thing ever again.

New Living Room?

We are fast approaching the 2 year mark from when I first mentioned getting some new living room furniture and it seems as if we are fast approaching doing something about it. Today we stopped into the local Badcock furniture store and bought a coffee table (looks something like this.) We have also provisionally picked out a sofa (looks exactly like this.)

We are waiting on actually redoing the living room until the real dusty (demo & sheet rock) kitchen work is over. We bought the table because we didn’t want to lose out, they had only 3 left in the warehouse and that model has been discontinued. The couch we could wait on because there were 20 in the warehouse and 20 more inbound, so the only way we lose out is if Badcock sells a hundred of them a week for the next 4 weeks or everyone reading this blog goes out and buys 133-1/3 sofas each.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1194

The Ottoman Empire

After a dry run of the route, and dining at the destination, of next week’s MMC Breakfast Rally that we are leading, we did the weekly grocery shopping. With that out of the way, we got down to the serious business of living room furniture shopping.

Our destination was Rooms To Go in Augusta. Not only do they have a big ol’ selection, but I was angling to up the $800 sofa to a $2k, six or seven piece suite with a “Free” 51 inch Samsung 3-D TV. And my plan might have worked had we been able to find something that met our comfort needs and more importantly had the looks/style we liked. Didn’t happen, where we got one, the other was not there or vice versa.

After lunch went back to the store where we saw the couch candidate the other day and to see how well it might match our current stuff we had brought along one of the accent pillows. Turns out it didn’t look half bad, but after a more in depth try out, we determined that the contoured seat areas were really not comfortable for the afternoon nap laying across pose.

On second thought, our current couch didn’t seem that bad, sure it was slightly worn, not nearly as bad as Marty Crane’s recliner, so let’s just say that it had acquired a nice patina. And because what had started this whole furniture shopping expedition in the first place was the desire to remove my feet off the coffee table, which not only holds our obligatory fan of magazines, but doubles as our dinner table on weekdays when watching Law & Order re-runs, we just took the easy way out and bought a $50 ottoman.

Couch Shopping, Desserts Bigger’n Your Head & You Sure That’s Right?

Last time we bought living room furniture we got a 3 piece matching set, couch, love seat and arm chair. Because it is just the two of us, the only piece that has seen appreciable use is the couch, so now we need a new one. The other two items are basically brand new, so we would like to keep them and just buy a couch. Because it has been quite a while, a matching piece is entirely out of the question. The object we seek will be something that will compliment what is staying. Not easy, the current furniture is a burgundy cloth with rolled arms accented with nail heads sitting on ball feet. Not too much out there in that style and to make it nearly impossible we have decided to get a couch with built in recliners. The second store we tried tonight had a possibility, but we still want to look at least a couple more places.

We had dinner out with the Masters Miata Club tonight at the Boll Weevil in downtown Augusta. The food is always good and tonight was no exception. They are known for their desserts and usually Donna and I decline, but for some reason tonight we didn’t. Boy are we sorry. Here is a photo of some of their desserts, our Perfect Chocolate cake (which we “spoiled” with two scoops of vanilla ice cream) was larger than those shown, it was actually hanging off both sides of the plate!

On the way back from Augusta we filled up the Emperor’s gas tank. Regular was under 3 bucks, and because HRH takes Premium it was going to cost us $3.17 a gallon, but with our shopper\’s discount it too was under three at $2.97. I had reset the trip odometer in Clayton when we filled up last Saturday morning, I didn’t reset it when we topped off on Sunday, and so the mileage since that first fill up read 454.3. I took the last two gas receipts, totaled up the two tankfuls and got 15.065 gallons. That means the MPG for the past five days, which consisted of 60% windy mountain roads, 25% 2-lane back roads and 15% 4-lane divided highways was a respectful 30.16.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1072