no stopping her shopping

My girl friend is just back from a cruise, the lucky devil. Seeing that she spent the past two weeks on water, I naturally assume it had cured her of her shopaholicism (if indeed there’s such a word, or did I just coin it?).

Wrong. There’s lots of shopping arcades on board the cruise ship, not to mention that the ship makes frequent stops where she could happily hop onto dry land and shop to her heart’s content.

No wonder she was so eager to go. I just thought she was going to be left high and dry with no place to shop. Duh!

are you set to hit the beach?

Got your SANUK Fraidy Cat sandals?

Your ROXY Sea Salt swimsuit?

And your O’NEILL Jordy Freak men’s boardshorts?

No? Then you’d better check out the Swimsuit Sale @ Tilly’s for some of the best bargains on the coolest beach gear.

a matter of convenience

Although I’ve said many times that we’re going to cut back on eating out in an effort to be thrifty in these economic times, I don’t think we’ve actually pulled it off very well .

We still do have meals out every weekend simply because we happen to be out and it’s so convenient to just pop to a restaurant and have a bite to eat instead of going home after a long day out and slaving it out in the kitchen afterwards.

Sometimes we even eat out the entire weekend. Duh! So can you blame us if we start wondering whether we’ll be needing Lipovox soon?

new clothes for every event

I guess June being the month of weddings means many of us have already begun receiving wedding invitations pretty. I haven’t really bothered to spend a lot of formal wear for my kids over the years since they outgrow everything so quickly.

My son, for instance, has had this one tuxedo shirt for years that he only wears to weddings. I don’t think anyone would notice he’s always wearing the same shirt since they all look pretty much the same anyways .

I have some friends who run out and get their kids a whole new set of clothing whenever they get invited to some event. Some of the clothes they only wear once and by the next event, they’d have outgrown them. Seems like a big waste to me.

hold it no more

If I know we’re going shopping, I try to get the kids to drink less water. Quite honestly, we hate using the public restrooms, well, for obvious reasons. They’re badly maintained, stinky and wet most of the time.

A new hotel has come up near our favorite shopping mall and we’re really thankful for that. They’ve got a beautiful restroom with clean toilets and even a shower area with a nice bath faucet and shower panels. Not that we’ll be using the shower but at least we feel comfortable using the toilet stalls.

So yeah, going to our favorite mall just got better because now I don’t have to tell the kids to ‘hold it’ till we get home .

after the shopping

It’s been a wild week. We were besieged with relatives from out of town and as usual, that means shopping sprees, huge meals and activities galore!

The kids got to meet up with their cousins whom they don’t see very often. It took a bit of warming up to get them all reacquainted but it was all good. Everybody talked Facebook and Twitter, and there was no end to the exchange of online contacts. There’s your online generation for you!

At a little tea party we had, one of my uncles was raving about why it’s wise to invest in gold coins when times are bad. Interesting but I think he went overboard with hogging the conversation, and soon we all broke off into sub-conversations and he was left talking to the wall .