Sunday, January 23, 2011

Slipcover Pt.2, and Way Too Many Books

One week of blessed, blessed, blessed vacation. The man in my life took all this past week off to simply be with me, and boy, it was a blessed, blessed, blessed good vacation. AND during the few hours we had to be apart, I got some more sewing done at the folks' house.


That's right, I worked on the slipcovers some more. I got the other side of the chair put together, and got the wraparound on the front of the arms pinned and one of them sewn. It was a huge feat for me, considering those were HUGE darts, and very confusing for novice lil' ol' me. And I give you full permission to ignore that little dribble on the front, there was a sick puppy incident. She got the seat too, which unfortunately stained a bit... they WOULD choose my magnificent work in progress to go be sick on, wouldn't they... grrr. But I guess with 6 animals in the house (and before you become all googley eyed with OMGness, most of them are indoor/outdoor, especially the cats... and one of those cats is mine and goes back to school with me tonight) you have to expect some damage.

Though in her defence, my Peskykitty DID "help" with the sewing process. She was very good at anchoring the chair down and attacking any who tried to touch or steal it (including me).

What else have I accomplished in this lazy, blessed, blessed, blessed vacation, you may ask? (or may not?) I stuck it to the man. One old, cranky, crabby, selfish, stick-in-the-mud man.

You see, I'm a bit of a sucker for books. I ADORE books. And recently I've discovered the joys of thrift store bookshelves, and finds such as hardback Anne Rice and Harry Potter and James Michener for as little as 50 cents. And not too far from my folks' house is this wonderful place called Gateway, which is kind of a thrift store that benefits a local shelter. It's HUGE. But, see, there was a problem. They had this pretty decent book section in the front, and a kind of afterthought book section in the back warehouse, but you could see that behind all those shelves, in the OffLimits zone, there were MORE shelves, piled and Piled and PILED in mountains and stacks of treasure and happiness. I finally managed to ask the right person for permission to get back there on Wednesday, and spent nearly an hour poking through the books that were just on top, coming out with a measley pile of books that could have been much larger, except I didn't want to overdo it. I mean, yes, they were 25 and 50 cents apiece, but I'm already having book space issues!

Well, by Friday, I'd been haunted by those lonely, neglected, rejected books, until I didn't really care if I overdid it. Me and my man went back, popped back into that section, and started looking with a vengeance. But by the time we had a really good stack of books going - fantastic books, painting and art and photography and carpentry and welding, some guitaring books of Metallica music for my little brother, and even a little hardback of Marguerite Henry's Born to Trot, complete with full color pages of Wesley Dennis illustrations (I still to this day ADORE his drawings) - a stack so tall we probably should have been calling it quits before we simply couldn't tote them all - an old man appeared at the entrance to the aisle.

What are you doing? he asked, arms folded, cranky expression fixed in place.

Looking for books, I replied. We asked if we could come back here and...

You're not allowed back here. It's not fair to the other customers. You need to get out of here.

Well look, we've got a bunch of books that we want, can't we still buy them?

No, leave the books, you're not allowed back here, it's not fair to other customers.

Well, what's the process of these books moving forward to the regular part of the store? Because we really want these books.

You can't have the books. It's not fair to the rest of the customers.

Frustrated, we left. I sulked. A lot. And kept sulking, and kept sulking, and kept sulking. My man was convinced (and he's pretty good at reading people, since that's what he makes his living doing) that the old man had taken it very personal that we were back there, and felt as though that was his very own stash. He convinced me to call the store, where I spoke to the manager, who supported the man's notion that we didn't belong back there, but for insurance purposes, but said that since we had books that we had wanted anyway that we should have been able to get them. She took my number, and went to look for the books. When she called back, she said she couldn't find the books. There were no stacks of art books. (!!!!)

More sulking.

The next day, I think my man was pretty tired of the sulking, so we went back, grabbed an unsuspecting employee, who was unwittingly dragged into our plot, and who escorted us back again, thankfully staying back there to help. I found the books - all scattered in. It became pretty evident that the old man had no intention of anyone getting anything out of there, after I had to once more DIG for the same books. The carpentry books never resurfaced. My man theorizes that CrankyButt took them home with him. Finally, with two armloads full of the same books, we escaped with our loot. I haven't counted how many we got, it was somewhere around 15 or so, and I paid $6.50. Score.

And later that night I used a gift card to buy another art book from Barnes & Noble.

I'm terrible. Anybody have some bookshelf ideas that are super quick?

1 comment:

  1. Wow! That's a lot of books so good for you! I am from Natchez. Nice to meet you and thanks for the info about the blurred pictures....Christine

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