Revelations

I'm not much of a shopper. Mostly I buy books, CDs, and DVDs, which means that I mostly buy things online. When I break down and decide that I need new clothes, I tend to buy stuff that'll last. Practical stuff. Stuff that'll stand up to repeated washings and doesn't require dry cleaning. Stuff that never goes out of style because it's never really in style. I generally dress tidily and respectably and reasonably attractively, but stylishly? Not so much. I also don't wear make-up unless I'm going to a wedding or something. Since I generally try to avoid weddings, it doesn't happen that often.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm really a girl.

Jim, OTOH, doesn't mind shopping, but he doesn't like to spend money. I'm not sure how he reconciles those two things, but he does. Generally it means that he's willing to tag along to the mall with Daughter o' Jim as long as she doesn't take hours to pick something out or ask him to pay for too much.

This weekend, however, we both had to put all that aside and Get The Christmas Shopping Done. I've never spent so many consecutive hours in stores in my life. I thought my feet were going to fall off. I had to set up an IV of white wine to recover when I got home. For his part, Jim more or less melted his credit card: after a series of unusual purchases, he discovered that it wouldn't work anymore. An hour later, the credit card company phoned him to make sure that he'd actually been the one doing the buying--they'd frozen his account because they thought his card had been stolen. Heee.

The purchases that caused all this? (1) Jim discovered online shopping on Saturday night after Round 1 at the stores and ordered a whack of DVDs. (2) He bought me a ring. It has not yet been established whether or not he's officially divorced, and he's kind of squeamish about the subject of marriage, having come out of a particularly bad one several years ago, so we're calling it a "commitment ring." He's willing to call it an engagement ring as long as people know that we're going to be engaged for about 20 years. I told him that if he ever actually wants me to marry him, he's gonna have to get down on one knee and propose properly.

Looking at rings accounted for a fair amount of the shopping on Saturday as neither of us could make up our minds. We had several potential candidates and finally drifted into one last jewellery store just to be sure. I started trying on everything, just for fun, including a $10,000 ring with three fairly honking diamonds on it. (I had to--when am I ever gonna wear something like that again?) I also tried on another one with much smaller, but very sparkly, diamonds, and damned if I didn't come over all girly just looking at it. It was still a wee bit pricey, though no where near 10K, and I was just kidding, really. Then we went for lunch, and I was about to tell him to get me (the much less expensive) one that we'd seen somewhere else when he suggested we go back to the last store again. I think all the twinkling hypnotized him or something. It's now in being resized to fit my finger, and I really want to get it back because it's just so pretty!

And so we learned two lessons this weekend: I am, indeed, a girl, and Jim's not nearly as much of a skinflint as he thinks he is.

All Is Well

For those who were wondering, flurblewig touched base today and reported that she is doing well, had a great time in Florida on holiday last week, and has completed the first draft of her novel. The break from LJ was to facilitate the latter.

I'll stop worrying now. :-)