Yesterday I was craving a crafts fix and knew that shopping online just wouldn’t bring the immediate rush I needed, so I visited one of the big-box crafts stores – A.C. Moore – and bought a variety of odds and ends:

1. Sketch book, pencils and eraser for the class I’m starting next week called “Basic Drawing for People Who Can’t Draw a Straight Line” – it’s not so much the straight lines I’m worried about as the ones that are actually supposed to represent some object in a manner that does not bring to mind crayon scrawlings posted on the refrigerator door.

2. Puffy yarn and crochet hook, purchased in the misguided belief that I could make a blanket for my cousin’s new baby (who, at 10 lbs 8 oz at birth skipped right past the newborn stage and jumped directly into the toddlerhood). When I tried to put hook to yarn last evening I realized my eyes are so bad I’d need a scanning electron microscope to be able to see the stitches.

3. Tacks for Becca to make a fabric-and-ribbon covered bulletin board. For a teenager who listens almost exclusively to hip-hop, would love nothing more than to buy a new pair of shoes every day, and expects to receive a convertible on her 16th birthday (hah!), she has a definite streak of Martha Stewart buried deep inside.

As we are all sorely aware, yesterday was September 11th. The advertisement at the bottom of the receipt caught my eye: “Come to our MOONLIGHT MADNESS, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006 From 6pm to 9pm”. Now, beyond the thought of celebrating moonlight madness with a bunch of other middle-aged women hot on the scent of a bargain, was the realization that A.C. Moore must offer time traveling as an incentive to get you to go back to Sunday evening to load up on fake flowers and motorized-flying-Halloween-bats-on-a-string. You’d think they might want to make more of that in their marketing materials.