Terracotta? Looks like orange to me.
Over the course of a weekend, wor lass and I managed to either spend or commit ourselves to spending a small fortune in the space of 6 hours.

On Saturday, we awoke to glorious sunshine and the prospect of a long weekend stretching out before us. So what did we do with our time?

Well, firstly, we took advantage of DFS and their half price sofa sale. Cheap furniture? For sale? On a bank holiday? Who would have thought it?

Now, I like sitting on sofas, and I quite like spending money (although at times it scares me that I'll have to pay the debts off one of these days), but I detest sales people. Sitting in a show room, having decided what we wanted, we then had to listen to a bloke prattle on about some all singing all dancing spray that they put on the sofas to stop them getting covered in red wine and blood.

Now, surely they should just put this on at the start if it's so bloody important. But apparently that would mean they weren't competitive in the market place. So instead of being up front about their charges, they shove them all on as "extras" after you've committed to buying the sofa.

Surely they misjudge the intelligence of their customers. It's not hard to judge the whole package between shops, rather than just the start price, and in many ways that would be a fairer comparator, wouldn't it?

Anyway, we signed up to his magic spray (although the temptation to tell him to shove the whole thing up his arse was quite great). Then we had to deal with an even bigger moron who came and took our bank details (obviously a task too demeaning for the salesman), and who couldn't grasp the simple question we asked about the date that money would be taken from our account.

Anyway, as the ball of rage rose inside me, we managed to complete the purchase before I tested the blood repellent aspects of the cover with the arterial spray of the salespeople, and left the shop mercifully spatter free.

We then went and bought a stereo.

Now as background to this, we've been without a decent working CD Player for about three years now. In which time I've still bought CDs, but not really listened to them as much as I would have liked. However, it's all been worth the wait.

Staggering home from Richer Sounds with boxes under our arms, it was like Christmas all over again as the product of my tax rebate left me with the most complex of 3D jigsaws. (I put this bit of cable where?) Still, it all seems to work now, and it sounds bloody brilliant.

Finally, on our day of mad spending we bought a carpet for our study/ third bedroom. Unfortunately, this meant we had to spend the whole of Sunday and half of Monday painting the bloody room, and getting rid of the terrible colour scheme we had inherited form the previous owner.

So not quite the restful weekend that I'd dreamt of on Friday night...
- posted by Paul @ 12:59 pm