Saturday, February 21, 2009

A Thrifty Fun Friday

Lately we've opted to change our schedule a bit and have been making our weekly trip to town on Fridays. The main reason for the change is that we've found our Grocery Outlet seems to have a better selection on Fridays.

This week, in addition to our usual gad-about, we stopped by Goodwill. Lindsay has been wanting a pair of skates and she just had a feeling Goodwill might have them this week. Turns out she was right. We found her a pair of real nice "shoe-skates", that looked like new. There's not a scuff mark to be seen, and they fit her great, for a mere $4.99. In addition to that great find, we found two coats for her (one for play, one for town), and one for Nathan (for town, his old one is still fine for play).

I was also tickled to find several items I was interested in, including 2 items which I had been in search of for quite some time. The one I was most excited about was the abacus. While I realize most folks rely on a row counter, which is easily found for a reasonable price at most any store that sells yarn, or several other options available for keeping track of the rows and pattern repeats when knitting and crocheting, several years ago I decided to give the kids' small abacus a try and I liked it! However, that little abacus did have it's drawbacks. First off, it was only one row, and it contained but 20 beads. I really wanted more rows and more beads to keep track of various aspects of certain patterns. Secondly, the kids' abacus was but one small part of a math learning system, which made it rather bulky, especially considering it's limits for my uses.

My new abacus is sitting proudly on the dining room table for now. I sat it there last night so I could admire it immediately upon entering the room this morning. Once I've got my other chores done for the day I'm looking forward to setting it beside me on the couch and getting to work on one of my latest knitting projects.


In the meantime, Lindsay has requested assistance in learning to skate with her new skates. It's been quite awhile since I've donned a pair of those things, and mine weren't nearly so fancy as hers, but I think I should be able to remember enough to give her a good start. Once she has that down at least a bit, I'll be posting a photo of her demonstrating her success!

Hope you all are having a wonderful weekend!

2 comments:

Kim said...

So....um, you mentioned that there were 2 items you found which you'd been looking for for some time....what is the second item????

Boondock Ma (Kim's Mom) said...

Aah! You've got a point! The second item I'd been searching for was actually not quite what I'd been hoping for, but kinda cool just the same ;-) I found an "hour glass", which I carried around in the store to attempt to determine the time it measured. I estimated it at the time I desired,2 minutes. Once home and set up on a level surface however, it ended up being an egg timer, with a 3 minute span. We'll make use of it, but the 2 minute sandglass search continues ;-)