About Town
At Target: People's inane personal conversations, mostly directed at cell phones, bombarded me at every turn. ("She said I looked really great, and I told her, I'd given up drinking soda for Lent, and then she said, even after Lent, I should. . . .")
In Cartytown: Goodwill has opened a boutique store in the old Lorraine Hardware building. On the one hand, Hot dog! A thrift store in walking distance from home! On the other, a skirt appropriate to wear for work would cost 20 bucks, not the usual 6. P bought a book on Virginia architecture that we don't have already.
Reading: John Green's An Abundance of Katherines. Rather sweeter than Looking for Alaska.
Listening: Nanci Griffith, Ruby's Torch.
4 comments:
Goodwill has a "boutique" store? Huh?
For the last 15 years, thrift stores have played with the model of setting apart better-label clothes, what they declare "vintage," and good furniture and whatnots. In the old Sal. Army by the Diamond, there was a separate boutique in a different room in that warehouse-y space. I think Goodwill sells some good stuff online. The practice lets them charge more money -- and so raise more money for their charity work.
But of course it means that the days of $3 designer skirts and 10 cent atomic-patterened dinner plates are behind us.
Yes, yes, the days of good thrifting seem to be behind us. I mourn for "Saks North Avenue," the big Salvation Army store that once occupied a dead department store in a section of Baltimore that had never been fashionable and ceased to be even respectable by 1970.
Though I'd rather have spent my days shopping in its original incarnation as a suburban Miller and Rhoads store, I particularly miss the ARC at Southside Plaza. I always found good stuff there--beautiful old suits that would have sold for $500 new, random pieces of my china and silver and crystal for 10c apiece, and $15 pianos--I never did find room for one, but I liked the idea, anyway.
We stopped by there to see if we could find anything for the new house. I found a knock-off purse I through about getting my mom for mom's day...it was $40! Not so thrifty, eh? We then searched EVERYWHERE for a mailbox that would somewhat match the look of our 1900's row house...no luck. Not even the Pleasants on Broad had one. I guess folks in Richmond don't save their tear downs when renovating. Our next hope is to find some original brick to redo our retaining wall. What do you think the chances are of that? On a good note, we found a fantastic guy to do our transom and are excited.
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