A wide and varied day …
- In the “The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From The Tree” category, we went upstairs at 10:30 last night, to discover Katherine in bed playing with her Leapster computer system. Hard to get too angry with her, given that we’d been staying playing on our computers, but I think the Leapster will not be something she accesses up in her room at bed time any more …
- Met the folks up at the El Torito Grill in Brea and handed off Katherine for a day of cousin-visiting fun. My mom mentioned that, having read my blog, she’d taken them to see cousins to see The Incredibles the day before (and they’d enjoyed it immensely).
- Hit the Brea Mall, which is oddly laid out even for a place with five anchor stores. We had some Christmas returns, but Margie also had a Nefarious Plan.
See, she still had an envelope of expired gift certificate and product return receipts from various stores from our wedding — which, if you’re keeping track, is going on ten years ago.
Now, me, I’d write them off as lost opportunities. Our fault for not doing something with them, too bad, so sad.
Not Margie.
To each shop we visited that she had stuff for (Williams-Sonoma, Victoria’s Secret, Macy’s, Robinsons-May), she spun a tale of having found these receipts/gift certs in an old purse, and could they exchange them into gift cards or something. There’s some force in the request, as California now has a law about such things not expiring — but said law went in after our wedding.
Macy’s was the least responsive. The manager there working customer service wouldn’t take the old receipts, but okayed “as a favor” converting the gift cert to a gift card.
Williams-Sonoma couldn’t convert them (because the computer systems had changed in the meantime), but did give Margie a SASE and form to send them into the home office for validation and return of a gift card.
Victoria’s Secret’s only question was whether we wanted the two gift certs changed into one gift card or two (and how much did $25 and $30 make).
Robinsons-May also accepted all the old stuff.
We repeated the process at Home Depot later on. The manager there was tickled — “I have folks who can’t find their receipts from two days ago, and you bring me return credit receipts that are ten years old?” — and handed over a gift card for the amounts with no worries.
My wife rocks. Not something I would ever do, and she respects that, just like I respect her special abilities to do so. 🙂 In return, I carried most of the bags as we went along …
… since, whilst we were about this, we did some shopping. Margie didn’t get much, but I went on one of my clothes shopping binges, since the stores were all in Heavy Post-Holiday Discount Mode. Robinsons-May was at 40-60% off men’s clothing, plus another 15% off at the register, which resulted in many fine deals on slacks, including some dress shirts costing me $4. Sweet.
- The visit to Victoria’s Secret was, as is always the case, the most oddly embarrassing, surrounded by a plethora of women’s undergarments and slinky stuff. I think it’s because it’s one of the few places where one can legitimately, or at least with both reason and interest, consider what the clothing in question looks like on the folks who are shopping for it.
I dunno. Much of the underwear looks pretty uncomfortable, and slinky things rarely stay on Margie long enough to be worth the cost. YMMV.
- In conjunction with our gift to Jim and Ginger this year of a DVD/video cassette player (the prices on DVD players this year are so ridiculously low that it’s close to the point where anyone who doesn’t now have one probably doesn’t want one. I mean, $20-30, with rebates? That’s less than the cost of some of the DVDs you can buy to put in them!), Ginger decided, seeing the output to their 80s-era low-end TV, that she’d like a new TV for her birthday — and if it arrived before the Rose Parade (one of their very few regular TV viewings), she’d be quite happy. So we took advantage of some gift returns to Costco to pick up a nice TV for her.
I’m just trying now to figure out how to bring my Long-Laid and Cunning Scheme to fruition and get the time to watch my new Return of the King DVD on the new player and TV …
- Also in the gifting area was the late arrival of a calligraphed wall plaque (Michael Podesta) for my folks with Micah 6:8 on it. Passed on with the kid, and received warmly.
- Mary came up for New Years and other end-of-the-week revelry, and she joined us with dinner at my folks (featuring my mom’s famous pasta sauce, which has certain other ironies). Quite enjoyable a time. While up there, I installed all the various ad-ware/spyware–prevention software I’d intended to do for a while.
Tomorrow is the annual Katherine Day, wherein we do a bunch of fun stuff all day just for Katherine. One of those things will doubtless be running off to my folks (again) to recover Blue Bunny, who somehow got left behind there …
Whew. Long day for us all.