Mall!.. and other shopping...

To sum up the last 2 weeks in December:

I bought Elliott's x-mas present: 1 stainless steel water bottle ($13) and a pair of house slippers ($24). Elliott went the more eco-friendly, non-consumerist route and got me tickets to Diavolo at Merrill Auditorium.



I bought $78 worth of stuff at Swimoutlet.com-- 2 swimsuits, 1 pair of swim trunks for Elliott, a swim cap, and goggles. Actually, it was $58 because I returned one of the swimsuits.

We bought a 12-piece Pyrex storage set and 4-cup measuring cup at Bed, Bath, and Beyond ($32 minus $10 coupon minus $5 rebate = $17) and threw out a lot of the plastic ware. I'm really bad about re-using takeout containers; I can't bear to throw them out or recycle them. So this is a step in the right direction of not giving ourselves cancer.

Anntaylorloft.com had this buy one get one free sale (I get their promo emails to my hotmail account-- big mistake!). They also had this navy blue trench coat I've been eyeing ever since Meredith wore one on this episode of Grey's Anatomy waaaaay back. So I got one in navy blue and my sister got one in khaki for a total of $140.



The day after Christmas we had to kill some time while in Ellsworth so we stopped by the LL Bean Outlet there and bought: 1 sweater for Elliott ($20), 2 sweaters for me ($12 and $15), Bean bag ($7), and a Stonewall Kitchen gift basket (for us; $12).

And the one trip that occurred January 1 (no rulebreaking!): I got this $50 gift card to the mall from work. I'm very proud to say even though I've lived in Portland for over 1.5 years, this was my first time actually in the mall (okay, one time I went into Linens 'n Things to buy one item and one time we went to Macy's because Elliott had a gift card, but both times were before this experiment and we didn't actually venture into the mall part). Anyways, it reminded me why I don't shop at malls. Eighty percent of the people were middle and high schoolers killing time and the other 20% are people walking slower than molasses in January... in Maine... northern Maine. We spent what seemed like forever there but at the end of the day I had an additional two pairs of office-appropriate pants plus a sweater ($40 + $14 + $25 - $50 gift card = $29). Elliott got 2 pairs of pants for $25 (total!), which were put on a gift card. I never thought going shopping at a mall would ever be an "event" in my life but... here we are. Oh, and the car wouldn't start when we were trying to leave the mall; I can't figure out if this was the mall gods trying beckon us back in or the anti-mall gods punishing us. Thankfully a good samaritan gave us a jump.