Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Catalog hell

In the past, I had limited my online purchases to smallish items, ordered from Amazon or one or two other retailers who did not share their mailing lists with anybody. Consequently, I seldom received any catalogs from other merchants pushing their stuff.

However, when I moved into this place three months ago, I needed a lot of furniture and housewares in a short period of time, and the internet (with its home delivery) seemed to be the way to go. I ordered stuff from three different companies (Pottery Barn, Target, and Home Decorators Collection; the last two were through Amazon.com's affiliate program) as well as a living room set through furniture.com, with whom I had dealt before without incident. Somebody sold my address to the catalog pimps, because I have been bombarded with catalogs ever since that time. At first, it wasn't too bad; a couple of catalogs a week, with stuff that was vaguely interesting to me. However, today I received no fewer than seven catalogs, including two that I can never see myself ordering from; they were country and Victorian styles, and my design aesthetic is not either style. (Those links are the stuff that is my style.)

Why don't the wizards who sell my information do a better job of screening it? It's bad enough that they shared it with ANYONE, but at least limit it to stuff I might actually buy. C'mon, flowered curtains and lace doilies? Toile and black walnut? Urgh.

posted at 06:32 PM | permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, January 1, 2006

Happy New Year

I hope that everyone's 2006 turns out to be better than 2005, even if 2005 was your best year ever.

I don't ordinarily do resolutions, but I resolve to continue to lose weight. So far, I have dropped 54 pounds; I have 12 more to go to hit my target weight of 179 pounds. I'm slowly reintroducing some of the higher-calorie foods that I had stopped eating, but missed terribly (chocolate, anyone?), but I make sure that I cut back somewhere else to keep the total calories for the week down.

I just came back from a shopping trip to Seattle, where I essentially bought a new wardrobe, because none of my old clothes fit any more. Goodwill is going to get some nice stuff that is in great shape but no longer fits me. This is the best time to shop, because Macy's, Nordstrom and J. Crew were all having big after-Christmas sales. I spent more than I planned, but I got a core of a decent wardrobe to build upon.

posted at 04:50 PM | permalink | Comments (0)