On A Rainy Spring Day

Saturday Michael and I planned on going hiking. It’s been awhile and I was looking forward to trying a different trail I found near the house. Unfortunately, the so-called “dry” (I use quotes because dry in Oregon means the weather channel is predicting 20% chance of rain) day turned into a downpour pretty much all day. Scratch that hike!

Instead, I went to the gym for the first time in many many Saturdays. I’ve been historically going to the Warrior Room but am currently out of classes and have been too lazy to buy more. I hope to go next week. Anyway, it was kinda nice going back to the gym and doing my own workout at my own pace. I warmed up and then did some weights–incorporating some of the things I learned at the kettle bell gym. I did burpees, two-armed kettle bell swings, one-armed swings, regular squats, pushups and deadlifts. Then I went to the treadmill to do my Couch to 5k plan.

After the gym we went out to lunch at McMenamin’s (a local restaurant chain) that was near the mall because we were going to Macy’s to register. 🙂 For lunch we split an appetizer of spinach artichoke dip (it was a small enough portion for two) and then we both ordered a salad.

My salad came with grilled chicken, pickled red onion, toasted hazelnuts and bleu cheese with a raspberry vinaigrette. It was really good! And it wasn’t humongous. Michael got the Cajun chicken salad with bleu cheese and bacon and tomato. I had a bite and his salad was pretty damn tasty.

After lunch we went to Macy’s to register for wedding gifts. I’d already started the process and created a registry with a few things on it just as a placeholder on our wedding website until we got around to doing it for real. I’m glad I did because it made the process much faster. We got checked in with the lady there and we were given a scanner and off we went!

It’s kind of weird registering for gifts. At our age we already own our house and have most things we need/want. Basically we selected things that have been on our wish list for awhile but haven’t splurged on it (for example: a Keurig coffeemaker, etc). There are things we already have, like Le Creuset, that is just old and beat up. So we registered to replace our less than great cookware.

I also added a new crockpot to the list. The one I have works great and it’s a good size but it’s old and doesn’t have a timer. I’d LOVE to have a crockpot that you can pre-set and then go to work. There are a lot of recipes (usually chicken recipes) that I don’t do because they don’t need to be cooked for 10 hours…

I’m pretty happy with what we got on our list, although I will say that Macy’s was lacking some of the things we were looking for. I think Amazon will be the place to go for that. My suggestion for doing a wedding registry right is simple:

• Eat a meal before hand and bring water with you. Being hungry and cranky is not the way to go.
• Pre-register online to make the visit easier and quicker. 
• Dress for shopping–meaning, you’ll probably get hot while walking around the store so don’t wear a big sweater and jacket. The less you have to carry the better. 
• Have a list or idea of things you want to look for. The store can become really overwhelming and it’s hard to know where to start. But I’d already kind of started a list of things we definitely wanted on the list (like a new kitchen garbage can, a wine rack, etc) and that helped narrow things down.

After an hour we went downstairs to check out the furniture section. Some of those Lazy-Boy chairs were sooo nice! I told Michael we couldn’t get any though because we’d never do anything ever again. We’d just lay back in those chairs….

We did find one dining room set that we both liked a lot and wasn’t ridiculously expensive (or embarrassing to be add to a wedding registry). We looked at beds and bedding and found some things we liked but things that weren’t EXACTLY what we were looking for so we skipped it. One of the comforter sets we LOVED was this one:

I scanned it and then we decided to delete it. Even though the red was sexy and the sheets were super soft, I realized that red was probably NOT the color to have in the bedroom when you want to relax and go to sleep. Something soft and gentle is probably better–sage green, creamy yellow, soft blue…Oh well! The search continues.

It was a fun day and the registry only took about two hours. Any longer than that and I think I would have made bad decisions! The nice thing about doing it at the store is that you can touch things and see if it’s really what you want (like towels) and then you can delete things at home after you’ve had time to think about everything.

What were your favorite wedding gifts?