Friday March 27, 2008

It's the day before my little girls 8th birthday. My kids birthdays have always been one of my favorite holidays. To me, there's nothing more exciting than to celebrate another year of memories and time with my favorite people...my kids.

With Summer's b-day being so close behind Christmas, we usually have a hard time trying to figure out what to give her. Most everything she wanted she got for Christmas. Our solution to this problem usually involves fun activities instead of gifts.

Summer has been wanting to see the movie "Monsters Versus Aliens". I have to be honest, I am not much of a movie watcher at all. Movie watching has always been a dad and daughter activity in our household. So "Monsters Versus Aliens" was on the agenda for the day.

Lucky for me 'cause I got to drop them off at the theatre and hit the thrift store nearby. I have spoke of my confusion with this particular area of town before. Although the thrift store was probably only a mile or so from the theatre, I ended up making it a few miles. At one point I thought I was going crazy and had a total loss of even where I was even though everything looked familiar to me. Sigh.....If I ever figure out the spaghetti road system in this particular area of Austin it will be a miracle.

Another things that was agitating me was that I had forgotten my sunglasses at home. It was overcast when we left the house so I didn't think about it until the blaring sun started to show its shining face. Somehow I also discovered I had left my reading glasses at home too. Without these two very important items, I felt like I was missing a limb.

My first goal when I finally arrived to the thrift store area was to hit the dollar tree and grab me some dollar sunglasses and reading glasses. My favorite thing to check out at the thrift store is the book section. The trip is totally wasted if I don't have reading glasses to scour the books.

Toby finds it amusing that this particular thrift store is my favorite one in Austin. Here is Austin, Goodwills and Thrift Stores are very clean..almost like department stores instead of second hand stores. In Mobile most of them are pretty dirty and the funky smell would knock you over when you walked in.

I was really disappointed when I first moved here and couldn't find a familiar dirty smelling Goodwill or thrift store.....that is until I found the Texas Thrift Store. In my thrift store expertise I have found the dirty lower class stores have the best deals.

It's dirty, stinky, and most the cashiers and customers are Mexican so everything is written and spoken in Spanish. I'm getting pretty good at deciphering the signs. :-)

The plus side to this is there is a very large selection of books. They are very cheap too. I'm talking .25 cents per books for children's books and $1 for adult books. Another reason I love this store is I ALWAYS come out of there with school and reading books for Summer. Fortunately in this particular store, nobody is interested in what I find to be the "pot of gold".

It seems someone must have just dumped off all their unused school books. There were tons of curriculum books from K-High School. I just grabbed what I could use in the near future and left the rest for some other lucky homeschooler.

Here is what I got today...



I enjoyed my little shopping getaway. Surprisingly when it was time to go pick up Toby and Summer, I discovered how close I actually was to them. I can't believe I was that close and went so far out of my way to get to the thrift store...tsk, tsk, tsk.

After I picked them up we hit Office Depot, the Dollar Tree AGAIN, grabbed a bite to eat at Quiznos using a buy one get one free coupon, and last but not least the store that makes grocery shopping fun, HEB.

I think it was more of a birthday gift for me than Summer today. :-)