Shop till you drop

There are several things that I consider awesome under any circumstances--going to the movies, eating gummi bears, laying out by the pool on a 95 degree day, outlet shopping...

Pause on that last one. Shopping is for me (like most ladies I know) a thrilling hunt for (highly-discounted) treasure. Nothing really compares to that high you get when you find that amazing, figure-flattering, oh-so-gorgeous 75% off dress among the racks of JCrew. Nestled between last season's madras shorts and mismatched bathing suit pairs. Somehow that really just makes my day. One of my favorite activities (seriously) when visiting my home town is perusing the shoe store that sells pretty top-quality shoes for $15-$25 (mostly samples or worn-once returns).

Come to find out that shopping is not always so euphoric. Huh?

Over the weekend A and I had a mission to find three items at the Houston shopping mecca--The Galleria. Shoes for me to wear at the wedding, shoes for A to wear to nice occasions, and lime green and blue ties for the groomsment to wear at the wedding (and keep as a gift). After three to four hours of scouring Macy's, Saks, Dillards, the other Macy's (yep, did I mention this mall is ridiculous), Banana, Nordstrom and various random shoe and men's stores--nada. We even stopped for a pizza break and that didn't help my mood. Shopping when you have an extremely narrowly defined goal and extremely picky people (guilty) is torture.

And A was very amused at my short attention span for this particular style of shopping. He explains this is how men feel while shopping at any time, since women shop for fun and men shop to find things they NEED. Shopping for needs is not fun, it's frustrating!

So anyhow. We found none of the three items and to salvage the day, we stopped at FedEx/Kinkos to do a bit of productive wedding invitation prep.

This picture is of A helping to size the paper for our pocket folds (cute). Isn't the paper an awesome color???

Anyhow, I have decided that we may just stick with our backup plan for the groomsmen's ties, which are plain lime green ties to be worn with a traditional two-button tux and ivory shirt/vest. I think this will look great and the men probably don't want lime and blue ties as gifts anyway.

As for my shoe situation--the hunt continues. Am currently considering an option of either ivory low-heeled sandals or lime green ballet flats (which I'm sure exist although I haven't seen them yet). Or perhaps ivory ballet flats with a DIY green flower pinned to the toe!