Puppies in a Basket!

Each year around this time, Lucie and I have a ritual of buying our new calendars. All we have to do is wait a week into the new year and they are all on sale for half price! Sure, the selection isn’t as great as if we had bought them before Christmas but that’s not really the point. We can buy two calendars for the price of one and then with the money we save, we can get a copy of People and coffees at the Buck.

This year we went to the Barnes & Noble near the Circuit City on Foothill Boulevard. There’s a Starbucks there with tables you can sit at. Plus it’s huge! And it’s got free wi-fi, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Last year, Lucie fell in love with this calendar about Coney Island. You know the amusement park? I didn’t even think it was still around. It seems like it shouldn’t be real, you know? Like it should only be in movies. Anyway the calendar was pretty nice, I guess. The people in the pictures were all really old - I mean, the pictures were really old. Women and girls in those long wool skirts they used to wear to swim in (how useless was that? It was probably cooler to just wear regular clothes) and all the men wearing hats (again, useless: beach…wind…think about it). Still, Lucie loved this calendar so she slipped a copy of it into the world atlas reference section, figuring no one’s going to find it there. Well, they must have sold a lot of maps that Christmas, because the Coney Island calendar was gone when we came back in January.

Lucie was pretty bummed. She ended up with The OC which had like a million pictures of Mischa Barton which is kind of ironic because that was the season Marissa died. I don’t think Lucie even knew who she was.

Ooh my favorite song is on the radio right now. “The love is gone away…”

Okay, so this year we didn’t even try to hide anything. We just got what we got. Lucie picked a calendar of lighthouses (let’s not be crude about anything symbolic there, please, it’s too early in the morning for that). Some environmental organization put it together and will donate profits toward its programs in the US which is pretty cool, but then I wonder if they get less money because we waited until the calendar was half price. I guess in that sort of a case, you should pay full price.

My calendar? Dachsund puppies. Every month a new puppy in a new basket. It’s pretty cute. My choices were all animal related: puppies of all makes and models, kittens in baskets (what’s with the baskets? Is that how they transport small animals these days?), paintings of cows and/or sheep, and weird frogs. Now, I think you can figure out why these are the only calendars left.

Maybe next year we will splurge and buy what we actually like before the new year begins.