That should be singular, or course. Whereas most women appear to regard shopping as a recreational pastime, if not an Olympic sport, most men, in my experience, are the exact opposite. A man’s approach is this: if you must go to the shops, grab what you want, pay for it and leave – get it over with – don’t window shop – don’t dilly-dally. Our two weeks over in Spain during February, when we actually bought Casa Libélule, were largely subsequently spent shopping to kit it out. Now we are back on our second trip, our initial goal was not so much shopping as visiting the same businesses again paying balances and arranging delivery of items previously shopped. Two of those visits, however, almost inevitably resulted in further purchases. What a thrill, more shopping. Arghhh!
Today, as had been forecast, rain arrived accompanied by a dramatic fall in temperature. Our butterfly attracting 23°C of yesterday fell to an Anglo-Saxon chilling 8°C this morning. With such fluctuations, anyone would think we were in England , except for yesterday’s 23°C in March, I suppose. Never mind, cold rain is perfect weather for some recreational shopping. Oh joy! We were off in search of more lights, external, this time, one for the front door and two for the balconies. We also wanted ceiling fans for the two main bedrooms. A business in Dénia had been recommended so that’s where we headed. One of this shops advantages for us was that it was directly above a Casa (the house-ware shop chain, not our house) where we also wanted to buy some decent wine glasses. We set off having first loaded the car with the waste cardboard from yesterday’s construction activities to dump it in the local basura for recycling.
There was a free parking space right outside the shop – yeah! Inside the shop was a bewildering array of lights: wall lights for inside, uplighters, bedside lights, wall lights for outside, ceiling fans with lights, ceiling fans without lights, artistic flight of fancy lights … and so it went on. I don’t know what has happened to us over in Spain but, once again, we both agreed on our favourite design of external wall light and on the most appropriate ceiling fan plus light for our bedrooms. I breathed a sigh of relief at a quick decision and picked up three outside wall lights and two remote control, 3-bladed ceiling fans. We carried them to the cash register where a lady, much more adept than we would be, picked out the relevant LED light bulbs to go with them plus couple of batteries for our fans’ remotes. We’d also seen a decent, simple uplighter for our dining area and added that to the mix. 462.00€. I patted my heart and muttered, “keep going you fool”. The shop assistant smiled and changed the price to 450.00€ – not a huge discount but worth a bit of Tom Foolery. 🙂
On to Casa and wine glasses. A little up-front research had shown that Casa had an event with 40% off it’s premium range of wine glasses. Choosing a dozen 47cl stemmed wine glasses and half a dozen cava glasses was easy. Naturally, the female of our party couldn’t leave it at that and started shopping around for other things that we didn’t know we needed. The salad spinner, I thought, did look useful. The hooked dangly crappy plastic thing to hold who-knows-what in the shower cubicle (when we’ve actually got a cubicle), I thought was perhaps destined for failure.
We returned with our carload of purchases and I was vindicated – the tacky shower doobrie did, indeed, turn out to be a waste of space, in the shower at least; it now lives under the sink holding Darwin knows what.
Our sun returned in the afternoon though the air was still chill. I warmed myself up assembling our five-shelf bookcase, which was blissfully straightforward, followed by our strong-enough-to-support-the-Bismarck escritorio [writing desk], which was also, rather surprisingly, very straightforward, only the legs needing bolting into place. This Danish wooden furniture certainly seems to be built to last. This is what another three cardboard boxes produced.
5 down, 11 to go. I’m hoping that the dining table will be as straightforward as the escritorio. 🙂
Very pleased to hear you’ve survived your cruise and made it to Jalon. Delighted to see you now have something to sit on as well as sleep on! Sounds as though you are having a good time. Just need a few dragons to fly past and you’re made!