duck-shaped pain

It meant dealing with The People on one of the grouchiest, meanest, get-your-cart-out-of-my-way-lady shopping days of the year, but it was worth it. Now I don't have to stress out next week about both shopping and work. The latter is sure to happen, I'm thinking, since my employer returns tomorrow from his week-long trip, and he's certain to have a bug in his ass about all sorts of new tasks that need to be done. Good thing I'm going out of town next weekend � maybe for all of next week.

I spent much of the morning going through some boxes of stuff I had out in the garage. Some of this is stuff I brought back from Oregon in August, some of it has been in there for years. I'm trying to go through all of it and make a list of the things I don't want and also of the things I'm going to need to get before or around the time I move. The latter includes things like bookshelves (I'm tired of the el cheapo black metal ones I got years ago � they're really not good for holding anything), drinking glasses (all the ones I have [2] broke somehow while in storage or on the drive back from Portland), and other pretty basic household items. These are all things that I've owned before, but they somehow got lost or broken or mysteriously misplaced.

Looking at my list, I realized something. I'm actually in the position financially to just go out and buy these things. Not only that, I can go out and buy ones I like, not just the cheapest ones I can find (bookshelves excluded, probably). It's an odd feeling to have this sort of power and choice all of a sudden.

I was talking to my mom about the things I needed to get, and she suggested I just try to find it all at thrift stores. Not a bad idea on the surface of it � were I to find any of the things I needed at the thrift store, I would certainly get them there. But, as anyone who regularly shops at thrift stores can tell you, if you go into one looking for a specific item, you're not going to find it. There will be a sudden famine of black skirts, can openers, armchairs or whatever item you need, the minute you start looking for it. Thrift stores work best on the principles of surprise and chance, letting you find things you didn't know you needed and weren't looking for.

For example, a couple of years ago, I needed a colander. I looked at some new ones, and they were too expensive. So I thought, hey, I'll just find one at the thrift store. So, I did, eventually, find a colander. It was only $1, so I got a good deal on it, but it took me a year to find one at a thrift store.

"Hey, wait," you're saying, "I see colanders at thrift stores all the time." Yeah, I know. So did I. And I find them a lot now. But when I needed one, they were nowhere to be found. Puzzling.

So, in addition to getting Christmas presents, I got some presents for me:

• drinking glasses

• the nicest plastic cutting board I've ever seen (wood ones are too hard to clean, for lazy folks like me)

• a set of 7 Pyrex refrigerator dishes with lids (I am relieved, in a way, that they're making these once again. It means I don't have to fear using my old ones anymore, and I enjoy the idea of having actual lids. I've been snapping up 1940s-50s refrigerator dishes at yard sales for years, and I now have about 10 of them. But only ONE LID.)

And, I want this, but that's going to have to wait until I actually find one.

[1] This resolution might fall by the wayside at any time. I have a ton of lemons, courtesy of my grandparents' lemon tree down in Arizona, that I have to do something with. What this "something" might be changes from day today. It could be lemon chicken, it could be preserved lemons. This morning, I thought about making a lemon roll. This was the most powerful urge of all, as I actually went out and priced the equipment I would need to make it with � a jelly-roll pan, a dough scraper and a better hand mixer than I have now. That effectively killed any desire I might have had to make lemon rolls � while those are all useful things, they're not things I really foresee using more than once a year. These are definitely things that can wait for yard sales.

[2] Except for my beloved "I'm Drinking Reclaimed Liquid From Sweet Septic � Placerville, California" glass.

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