ON A MISSION

This plate will look so good in my kitchen!

I was on a mission when I left home today. I had two reasons for wanting to get out of the house. Well, three, really. It was a gorgeous spring day with snow melting everywhere, I needed to escape the dogs and their muddy feet, and I had to buy wine glasses. A cheap but decent red wine is always on the table on Friday and Saturday nights, when we try to make gourmet meals. (Tonight, flaming peppercorn steak and my French bistro potatoes.) We were down to two wine glasses because Little Miss Poop, aka Scooby Doo, aka Gracie, had dragged two (full) wine glasses off the dining room table in the past two weeks (then tried to eat the broken glass).

In my efforts to be a Thrifty Scot, I firmly set out for the thrift store. No way was I going to go to an upscale department store and spend $25-30 for four wine glasses when they break so easily at my house. I think the Seeds of Hope thrift store is the best in town. It is clean, it smells good, and the staff arranges items so beautifully, as if they were on display in a gift store. You can actually find items that are "classy, not tacky". Best of all, it benefits abused women, giving them and their children a safe harbor from violence.

Not only did I find my wine glasses (four nice ones for 50 cents each), I also found other bargains. The fetching plate shown above (89 cents) will fit nicely into my kitchen, with its Provencal-Italian theme. I found a small needlepoint pillow with spring hares and purple iris ($2.50), a plaque with lilacs and a Grandmother verse ($1.59), because two of my favorite things in the whole world are lilacs and my late Grandma. There was this really unique battery-operated candle with a stone-looking candle holder and a cross entwined with grapes, with the Bible verse "I am the vine, you are the branches (John 15:5)". For $5.50, this was a real steal. The battery still works and the candle turns from purple to blue to green. I might give this to a certain someone who decks her home in purple for Lent, or I might just keep it for myself.

Except for a lovely blue and white Chinese porcelain vase ($7.00), I was really grooving on a purple theme: Grapes, lilacs, purple irises, wine. It must have been a "Purple Haze" sort of day. When I carried my full-to-heaping bag out of the store, I had spent $20.00 and some change, far less than a set of wine glasses would have cost me.

I was looking at the books when they started flicking the lights. Darn, they close at 5:00. Well, I'm sure Gracie will break more wine glasses, then I'll have to go back for more. Then I can look at the books, those pretty scarves, the candlesticks, the collectibles, that whole roomful of Easter items.

In the meantime, tonight we'll be able to drink our Barton & Guestier Merlot in our new wine glasses. The wine, which Dan recently discovered, is a steal too, marked down to $9.99 from $15.99. One bottle takes us through two nights, so that's quite a bargain. Thanks to the weather, the Seeds of Hope, a husband who loves to cook and has never hurt or abused me in any way, it was a good day.