Bookstore run

[celticdragonfly]

selenite is a marvelous man. I'd been talking about going out on a bookstore run, it's been toooo long. Rather than try to drag all the kids out, especially since Brendan misbehaved at school so we hardly want to treat him to any outing (and play time at the Barnes and Noble trainset), he sent me off by myself.

It's lovely when I get to go out by myself, and there's no kids with me, and I don't even have to keep an ear out for them. Feels weird, but nice.

selenite and I have to work on getting time TOGETHER without the kids. We do pretty well covering time for each other to be kidfree, but not together. We got a 15 minute drive together alone back when Maggie was about 6 months old. At ConDFW we had a sitter part of Saturday, so we got some time when we were both free of the kids, but it wasn't time to spend together, really. We haven't had a kid-free date since before Maggie was born. (Edited - actually, we did have one. Karl's mom visited & took Maggie & sent us to a movie.)

Anyway, I grabbed a bite to eat, and headed for the bookstore. selenite thought surely at this time of night the 35 wouldn't be a problem, so I wouldn't need to go all the way around the west side of Fort Worth to avoid it. It was a quagmire. I now know a new-to-me surface street way around a chunk of it. Lessons in Fort Worth street geography.

I got a magazine that selenite had requested I pick up for him, and a couple of books that a friend of mine likes and I therefore want to try. I have a whole LIST of books I'm impatiently waiting to come out in paperback. Most of them hadn't, but the newest Terry Pratchett book has, so I grabbed that. And the sequel to Sorcery and Cecilia is out in hardback, The Grand Tour. That one I grabbed. I'm not waiting for that one to go to paperback.

I also got a DVD of My Fair Lady - I'm leaning more towards letting the kids watch musicals nowadays rather than so much Disney stuff, and I wanted some more variety. I hope to keep encouraging them musically.

Then when I was checking out I saw a display of promotional postcards about a folk music CD, Stephen Foster songs by various current artists. It looked interesting. "Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster. I went over and put on the headsets and waved the postcard at the barcode reader to listen to samples. Oh, I was really, really tempted. But I'd just spent a good chunk of money on the books and DVD, and didn't think I should spend more. I went and found where they had it - they only had one copy in the store - oh, I was so tempted. Well, I'll add it to the Wish List, maybe later.

Tried a different surface street way home, one that I've done before but generally from the other direction in daylight. Missed a turn in the dark. Realized this a bit later, and that I wasn't sure where I was, but knew where I hoped the road would come out, and it did. It's all part of my education in Fort Worth geography.

Comments

[technomom]

Oh dear. I wish we were close enough to take kid duty for you! Kidfree couple time is important.

And selenite is a dear :-)

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

Musicals are excellent kid fodder! Although I hate the way "My Fair Lady" ends, but hey, it's dated. (Shaw ended "Pygmalion" on a completely different note that made much more sense narratively, but offended people's views of how romance Should Work.)

Re: Books: I have a Visa card backed by Yahoo! that assigns a point for every dollar I spend--and then I can trade those points in for a variety of things, including books, DVDs, and CDs at Barnes & Noble. You might want to look into that.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

We may look into something like that in the future when we get out of debt. Right now we're sticking with what Karl has set up for minimal interest, until we get it cleaned out.

Ah, the Terry Pratchett

[bkseiver.livejournal.com]

Your Dad just finished Masquerade - if that's the Pratchett you mean. He says he highly recommends it! Enjoy!

Re: Ah, the Terry Pratchett

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Oh, we've had Masquerade for ages. Love it. I think that's the one with the great line about how once you have the label "Mother", everyone in the world gets a bit of the label "child".

No, this is _Monstrous Regiment_.