mondays.

I realized today while picking weeds, that for the first time in a while, I look forward to Mondays. The last time this was the case was my freshman year of high school when I couldn’t wait to see what color Hawaiian shirt Tom Porter would have on, just like every other girl in school. Now Mondays include exploring new towns, enjoying fresh vegetables from the garden, and watching Downton Abbey with a cuppa tea. Wait til you guys see what happened to Lady Mary!!

The other day, Kasey asked if we wanted to exchange Christmas gifts. My first thought was no because of money. Then I thought about what Christmas morning would be like and I quickly said, “Yes! Let’s definitely exchange gifts.” We’ve talked about each making our favorite Christmas dishes for brunch that morning. Today we drove to Napier and separated from each other for the first time in two months. We each had an hour to shop. Kasey already gifted a chilly bin (cooler) that is also a boom box. How will we possibly compete with that?

An employee at an outdoor store tried to get me to buy Brittany a mosquito repellent clip when I told him our spending limit was $20. I said, “But she can’t just open this one gift from me on Christmas and it be mosquito repellent, you know?” He said, “Oh, and it’s $30.”

Kasey told us the story of how she had to go back to a store because they didn’t take $5 off of her sale item. She went to fill out the return info slip and after “Name,” she didn’t know any of the answers. Phone number, neh, couldn’t remember it. Address, neh, don’t have one of those. The employee wrote “declined” for each of the empty blanks and her co-worker said, “Just write ‘foreigner’ or something.”

We planned on meeting at Starbucks around 5pm. Even if one of us had our shared cell phone, we couldn’t contact the others if we were running late or if we wanted to know what our phone number was. It feels like we went back in time. At 4:59, I ordered an Americano in true American fashion and asked for the wireless password so Brittany could look up this red velvet frappe recipe she saw online earlier. The barista asked Brittany what she’d like and she said, “I just need to look it up really quickly.” So we sat down, looked, and Brittany went back up to the counter around 5:02 and the lady said, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re closed.” Mondays still aren’t perfect.