Check it out: Slave To Target

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one.

There is a whole darn blog dedicated to the romance of and being subjugated to that red retail bulls-eye, aka "Tar-jay".

And I'm not the only one going broke apparently easily dropping $30 to $100 there daily for no real reason. According to this blog's author, she spends as much money there on a near daily basis as I do. Although, scary as it may be, I definitely have this chick beat hands down. She's got NOTHIN' on me. I can tell you how much stock they have or where any item is located and what is marked down on any given day. Hey, just ping me. (And you all wonder why I am not in the Chat Box?)

It's my addiction, my cheap shopping "fix". What makes it all so easy is have the good fortune (or misfortune, depending on point of view) to live within 3 minutes walking distance to Target. Let me digress a second: Who puts half million dollar plus townhomes right behind Target? Better question who buys them? ;) LOL Anyway, I head up there daily for some God forsaken reason or another, actual or fabricated, like "Oh, I need a Starbucks", "I'm running low on paperclips", "We're out of milk", "There's a sale on..." and then I also get walloped at checkout with our obsecene NYS tax which is nearly 9% to add to the madness. It's alright, my neighbors seem to share my affliction to some degree, so it eases the guilt considerably.

Let me tell you, I was in my glory yesterday, after dropping a Ben Franklin and a few other dead Presidents, thinking how great it is to just walk or take a half second drive to my favorite mass retail store and shop in peace, dignity and relative style. Yeah, Super Wal-Mart is on the other end of the shopping plaza. I just about never go there anymore. Amen! I figure even if Target's prices are a little bit higher, the shopping experience is so much sweeter that I'm happy to spend more to save time because as we all know, time is money. A few extra bucks at this point in my life is worth it to have a better, more dignified, shopping experience and get poor man's "high style".

Target always has polite staff, clean shoppers and enough registers open and one, two, three I'm outta there so I can without a doubt make the afternoon school bus drop off by a well timed nanosecond (after leisurely browsing the isles and clearance racks for an hour or more). Wal-Mart NEVER has enough registers open, even at 7am I endure the indignity hour wait on line, possibly a self-check out line with the unshowered masses after feeling like I just completed a cattle drive sans the comic relief of Billy Crystal and Jack Pallance. I'd never make the bus in time, and inevitably would have to humbly call my neighbor to stand in for me. Upon my untimely arrival to claim my child, I'd have to face the little "shopping again" comments or even worse, leave my full cart and just walk out to make my deadline (as I still do have my priorities)! That is the ultimate price to pay for slow service and bad management. It's too much for me to endure, especially when I have a choice.

Despite my tragic shopping flaw, I have to say, my other half has really gotten off easily. He should be thank me daily that I save him money for as well as I spend it. He should be happy we're just "slightly" broke at the end of the week. We could be in debters prison or hunted by loan sharks. I could easily be a slave to the Woodbury Commons Premium Outlets, high end shopping mecca to the rich and shameless hailing from Bergen County, NJ, Manhattan, Tokyo, Brazil and to Europe, which is just a mile and a half down the road. Alas, I have exercised restraint and opted for "cheap chic". The way I see it, I'm savin' the man a whole pile of jing as slave to Target, instead of being endentured to the Commons. Everyone should have a woman as thoughtful and as thrifty as me!

Well, one more time, I'm giving the whole blog thing a go. As I mentioned in my "personal blog" over at Vox (sister to LJ and just easier for my family to navigate as they are essentially computer illiterates) which is owned by the same parent company as LJ, I'm over committed and your Generation 80s station programmer has her hands in too many pies to really do the whole blogging thing well, and that's a bitter pill for a quasi-perfectionist. At least LJ and Vox are free, so if I bag out again in 2007, there was no financial committment and no guilt about spending money on a wasted paid service everytime I see the link in my bookmark favorites. I highly doubt anyone ever much reads what I write, so I'm not disappointing anyone but myself anyway...

Call me crazy, but I did both Thanksgiving and Christmas soup to nuts (that's the whole I-talian shebang if that means anything to ya!) and made a slew of sterling silver and glass bead bracelets and matching earrings as gifts this year. Talking about making it easier for myself, eh? Well I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, but I did resolve to cater my holidays next year. At this point in my life, I'm finding no glory in the "I did it all myself" thing, even if I did time my Christmas fete perfectly and for all the food cooked/baked was actually not all that stressful. I'm not Martha and I realizes she accomplishes her picture perfect occasions with an army of support staff to make it all come together. I can gracefully face that at my age, I'm just plain running on empty and have nothin' left to prove. As much as I strive for panache and perfection, I realize I'll never be "Martha" and the way I see it, that's a "good thing"...

I'm really am a self confessed jack of all trades, and as the saying goes, "master of none". That is mostly due to my fairly short attention span and lack of "stick-tuit-ness". Although I'm learning to form the letters "N" and "O", I somehow feel obscenely compelled to do it all. (Then curse myself the whole time I'm completing the mile long "to do" or "committed to" list, where's the fun in that?) The only thing I've really stuck with over the course of 6 years on a daily basis through all the changes for better or worse, thick and thin, holidays, vacations, sickness and health is my Generation 80s Retro Radio broadcast. I guess that's because the music is part of my soul and the soundtrack to some of the most carefree times of my life. The music and the people I've met are after all these years, still fun.

There have been many new changes at Live365 and in the broadcasting world again as of January 1, 2007. I'll go into that in a future post, but it is taking some of the luster out of the hobby. I can say that one plus in amongst many of the less welcome changes is more server space and I'm able to keep a lot more songs on the server for more variety without taking off songs listeners want to hear regularly to accommodate some of the deeper album cuts or obscurity. This also helps with on the fly requests.

Alright, as per my last attempt, my entries will not cover anything specific, just whatever the heck is on my warped and cluttered mind at any given moment. Happy 2007!

Java Jane