Weekly Rundown: Trip to Oban

This isn’t so much of a ‘Weekly Rundown’ today, more of a Saturday Rundown, since it’s pretty much all about our trip to Oban yesterday as a sort of pre-birthday treat for me.

It meant a ridiculously early start. Alarm clocks should not go off at 5:30am on a Saturday. But it did and we got up and hit the road. It's a two hour journey to Oban once you get off the ferry. The journey was great. I'd spent the night before organising 90s music to see us up there. We're still listening to it now, so I think I did just about enough.

Then there was the actual shopping.

I've mentioned how I enjoy wandering around charity shops and picking up bits and pieces. Well, I am a pro at wandering around the shops in Oban.

That's just the books we bought. I scored a pair of old Latin study books in Oxfam (and am just dorky enough to buy them and spend most of the journey home studying them). The Last Sherlock Holmes Story is technically Mr Click's but I'll end up reading it eventually, so it's included here as well. I also found a couple of tops in Oxfan as well, all very nice.

I found The Perks of Being A Wallflower in another shop, where I also picked up stuffed gorilla for the car (every car should have one). And I did really well in the Mary's Meals shop where I found The Hobbit (which I know I already have four editions of, but this is yet another edition so I had to pick it up as well), a book called Becoming Bindy Mackenzie (which I have no idea about but which looks fun), a cross stitch pattern book and a handful of pages from a woman's magazine with an Alan Dart knitting pattern on it. And all for just £2.

I love the Mary's Meals shop in Oban. Everything is priced quite low which means they have a lot of turn over. When we were staying up in Appin we went round Oban almost once a week and unlike some of the shops, there was always something new in that shop. I've had so many bargain purchases over the years from there.

Another bargain of the day was in (I think) Cancer Research. Where I found an old copy of Photoshop Expressions for £3. While I was dithering over whether or not it would work on my laptop, Mr Click told me to just buy it and see. So I did. And it does.

See that photo up there with curved corners and a watermark? I totally photoshopped that! I'm still getting to grips with it (I've spent all of about 45 minutes playing with it so far). Luckily my late teens (and early twenties) were spent making fanart by adapting Photoshop tutorials to Corel PhotoPaint so it's quite familiar to me even though I've never played with it before.

Mr Click got some new clothes in the charity shops and even Tara and the rats weren't left out. The boys have a brand new grass house to replace the one they've had for a year and have half destroyed (literally, the top half of that thing is completely gone). Tara got a cuddly monkey toy who is currently waiting to have plastic surgery on his throat since she tore it out. I may have spent nearly £10 on that. Oops.

We had late lunch in Inverary, sitting in the car because it was cold outside. And there were odd rain showers too. Not really picnic weather. Then it was home for The Hobbit with the rats. As you can imagine my film buff rat, Wicket, enjoyed that:

That's the remains of the grass house to his left (and Yoda's ear).

So a very successful birthday weekend shopping trip. Tomorrow we've got my actual birthday. I've already received a £15 Amazon voucher from my colleagues and I've had some very interesting looking parcels arrive this week. I can't wait to see what's inside!

You might notice that this week there are fewer posts going up on the blog. That’s because last week was the last post in my A Series of Unfortunate Events Chapter-by-Chapter reviews. I have been posting these four afternoons a week (with a bonus post on Fridays) for several months now, so it feels a little weird not to be doing them at the moment.

It’s not the end of the Chapter-by-Chapter posts though. I’m gearing up to start sharing my progress through Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. That’s going to be interesting. But before I start that, I’ve got a wrap up post on A Series of Unfortunate Events going up this Friday.

Oh, and I set up a Facebook page for this blog last week. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can head over and like it. I'm slowly getting to grips with it, but I'm aiming to post things on there which I don't always get round to writing blog posts for.