Oh The Places You'll Go Shopping...

So Shaffer the Wafer have finally shared that we mutually hate shopping! I have known this about myself for awhile, but I don't think I really knew Pam was until she told me last night. This is good information--because--it explains why we have so many ridiculous adventures on our shopping excursions! Hopefully, you remember that whole IKEA fiasco from a few months back...

...well, the Tuesday evening Pre-Christmas Alderwood Mall extravaganza held many of the same joys.

Here are Shaffer Wafer and I's beloved photojournalistic highlights:

In the "Made in Washington" gift shop, where I picked up a few Christmas presents, Pam and I paid homage to my absolute favorite yet-to-be-mine Northwestern artifact: a pepper grinder shaped like the Space Needle! I first saw these 2 1/2 years ago, very early in my tenure in Washington, and it was love at first sight. Everytime I visit the mall, I stop by to say hello to the yet-to-be-mine Space Needle pepper grinder, and my eyes brim with tears as we part ways yet again. The price is just too much to justify...$110 for a pepper grinder?! Seriously...but it's amazing...and I long for the day where we will be together.

Next, we gave some mad props to the peeps at Williams-Sonoma who did, in fact, include a schmancy box of chocolates with our gift card purchases. Pam got her gift card after mine, and the lady was all, "Here's your box of chocolates to put your gift card in, free with a gift card, and you get the last one." I was all like, "WHAT IN THE BIJEEZY?" because I had moments before purchased a gift card and gotten no such complementary sweetness. So--the sales girl spent ten minutes scouring the back rooms and emerged victorious with the last box of chocolates for gift card purchases. I raised the box in triumph (imagine Rafiki raising up Simba and area wildlife bowing and singing "Circle of Life")... and moments later presented the gift to Jenny as a Thank You for letting me crash with her in her house of amazingness for five months.

But...the happiness of gift card chocolate-moment could not last all night...because then there was the dreaded event we can only call in shame, "The Panera Incident." Moments after Pam and I acquired two 52 ounce cups of water to quench our shopping dehydration from Panera, Pam proceeded to spill the entire contents of her nearly gallon-sized cup onto the carpet in the Children's section of Borders. What do you do when you dump a gallon of water on the floor in a bookstore? Pam tried to fan out the water so it'd spread into the carpet and dry, but the nicely scotch-guarded rug was not so accomodating. Bitty beads of water shot across the aisle and into the corner crevices of the book stack, leaving a massive pile of standing water just in front of the Dr. Seuss section...so Pam did what any self-respecting store spiller would do: work really hard to cover up the mess by stomping and smacking the standing water into the carpet weave and then running away really fast.

HA! Can't believe we got away with that one!

We then waited in a line so long it would certainly rival any you would have found in Moscow in 1987...and entertained ourselves by doing dramatic readings from the "impulse purchases" and continuing to take ridiculous photos of ourselves.

The evening concluded with a meet-up with our ten friends who were also shopping at the mall for a final hurrah dinner at P.F. Chang's. It took us about 27 minutes to get a glass of water...and about 90 minutes to get our food... So...while we waited Pam used her chopsticks to demonstrate yet-to-be-trends in teenagers' piercings. I'm not sure that the walrus look is going to catch on tomorrow, but after seeing the size of the plugs in some of my kids' ears, I'm sure it's not too far off.

Dinner was fun, though, because eleven of my dear Washington friends and I gathered around a table (with a lazy susan in the middle--woohoo!) for delicious Chinese sustenance. It made the bleary-eyed frustrations of holiday shopping melt into laughter and an overall ridiculously good time.

Thus ends my holiday shopping for 2006. Oh--how I long for my next day at the mall...right...