The Generalities of the General Store

I have an urge to blog a lot right now. At least you’ll have a lot to read!

I took an exciting and bizarre trip last week that I forgot to share with you! SILLY ME!

I had to go get some of the new dog food I’m feeding my pups because it’s on sale at Petcetera for cheap cheap right now. Since I moved downtown, the closest store location I found was at North Hill Mall. Now for those of you who don’t know why this particular mall deserves being mentioned, let me tell you!

This mall is probably one of the shittiest places I have ever been. It’s one huge, long hallway of a mall that was famous when I was a kid for being a mall with a lot of crime. People were ALWAYS shoplifting from the Sears department store in this mall. I’d like to think it’s because this Sears has never been redone, so it looks like you’ve stepped into 1968 when you go in. The lighting, the stone-imitated tile, the beige walls and yellow-stained lights….ahh the sweet smell of polyester and broken dreams. The rest of the mall seems like it came out of 1980. This mall even boasts one of those old San Fransisco stores! EEEWWWW! DO YOU PEOPLE (who live in Canada) REMEMBER THESE?! This store still has crap like fart gum, penis sippy-cups, and t-shirts with crap like “Just Do Me” written on them. They also sell a variety of Dollar Store esque porcelain crap like dolphins jumping through hoops in a fit of joy.

Don’t even get me started on dolphins.

This isn’t even the worst of it!

Steve wanted to walk around this time-warp of a mall after I bought dog food, so I reluctantly agreed. We ended up walking by this GIANT store simply titled, “General Store.”

“What IS this place?”

“We have to go in!”

I’ve truly never seen anything like this. Steve tells me they have stores like this in the states…and I can now see why. It was literally a general store. No theme. No reason. It was kind of like a more expensive dollar store. To give you an idea of what kinds of stuff they had, let me list a few things off (in no particular order, because there wasn’t one):

-Inuit artwork on sweatshirts
-porcelain dolls
-mugs with your name and country’s flag on it
-Japanese paintings
-ties with Jesus on them
-homemade wreaths
-embalmed spiders
-a crayfish paperweight
-hand-carved, wooden airplanes
-candy
-lamps
-gifts for a new baby
-clocks

the list goes on and on. Why would anyone want a crayfish paperweight?!

“You know honey, I really think that we need a new lamp, but I also just wore a hole through my Inuit sweater. What’s a wife to do?!”

“I know, honey! Let’s go to the GENERAL STORE!”

“YES! THANK GOD FOR THE GENERAL STORE!”

The best part of the trip is that when Steve was walking around, he thought he could let a sneaky fart go. The fart was not only NOT quiet…Steve didn’t notice that there was a man looking at some kind of random shit no more than 5 feet away from him.

I wish I could have taken photos.

I would have changed the name of the store, myself. Something more along the lines of “Old Time Bitch’s Good Time Crap Shop!”

It’s that time…

the time of the month when my boobs hurt! Why do you do this to me, oh wondrous mammaries?! At least you grow when this happens, otherwise I’d just be plain upset.

WELCOME TO CLEAVAGE TOWN! POPULATION: Me!

Because Buyin’ Stuff is FUN.

Let me start off by saying that I love buying stuff. To some of you, this isn’t really news. To others, well, I LIKE BUYING STUFF! HURRAH!
This weekend was full of me buying stuff. Don’t worry, I can still pay all my bills.

Again I have to talk about how freaking wonderful my new ipod is. To illustrate how much I love this thing, I have provided a simple mathematical equation:
It’s really all in the math, don’t you think?

Now that I can listen to music in my office (my now 3rd office at my job), I decided to get an ipod and a little speaker system to have at my desk.

My little speaker system looks something like this:
I think it was $40. For $40, this thing was actually a STEAL of a deal. It plays as if I paid, oh, let’s say $80. The real tech boner for me comes from THIS speaker set:
Ooooooh baby! So sexy! Someday, you will be mine. Though you really can’t easily carry this to work…

On a more dog related note, I took the liberty of perusing several dog-related stores this weekend. I hit up Healthy Hounds, Paws Pet Food, Pisces Pet Emporium, Petland, and Unleashed.

You know what Pisces has?!

MARMOSETS! They have fucking MONKEYS!
Did you know that you don’t need a licence to own a monkey in Alberta? WTF?! Is there some kind of secret monkey black market we’re all missing out on? I THINK SO.

Here’s what I actually ended up buying (instead of a monkey *frowny face*):

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1. An Orbee globe ball with treat space inside from Unleashed! I love how this thing looks. Dog’s see only in shades of grey, so I figure the pleasure of the purple-ish pink and blue ball are for my eyes. The first thing I noticed when I took this out for the dogs is that it smells kind of like mint. I don’t know why…
Winston won’t fetch the ball, but Zelda keeps rolling around in circles trying to wrap her mouth around it. She’s become obsessed with rolling it around the hardwood. 100% adorable.

2. Lucky Dog Buiscits from Unleashed. First of all, I drove right by this store because it’s in an odd area. When I walked in with Steve, we were met by a HUGE half husky-half St. Bernard dog who loves a good pet! The best part is that this dog leans into you and basically pushes you over by leaning on you. This made the trip worth it. Anyhow, I just bought these as a test to see if the dogs would like Pizza flavored dog treats. Again, Zelda was really excited about them…Winston spit it out! I guess I have a box of treats for Zelda specifically now!

3. Matching collars from Unleashed! Wohoo for this store! They have a wonderful selection of collars and leashes. I got a blue one for Winston, and a pink one for Zelda (when she grows a little to fit into it). I really like the metal clasps on these because they’re less easy to break! They were even on SALE. SCORE!

I also FINALLY found a bright pink collar that has a clip fastener for Zelda! HECK YES! Thank you again to Amanda for suggesting Paws Pet Food on 17th Ave! Wohoo!

I actually ended up finding another collar for Winston that’s black with skulls on it. Now he looks like a BAMF (bad-ass motha-#$%*^*). No one is gonna mess with this hunk of man now!

All and all, an excellent shopping weekend. Sadly, I didn’t find anything at Healthy Hounds that really tickled my fancy, but it’s still a really cute store.

I was also thinking today that having a dog supply store would be a friggin’ dream to do. I even have a little name for the store I’m thinking of. But hey, I love animals, I am good at retail, I’m trained professionally in management, accounting, entrepreneurship, and generally being awesome, so I have a start. How great would it be to come to work with your pets every day?! Who wants to go into business??? Amanda, I’m e-lookin’ at YOU (maybe???!?!).