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Memories 5: A Quirky Plan One of the few good (if strange) plans that I've come up with that actually worked out okay. For Jen's birthday last year, I was at a loss as to what I was going to get her. While I didn't really have any specific idea as to what I wanted to do, she had recently gotten me something very touching and personal and I wanted to get her something that evoked more of a sentimental feel rather than "ooooh, this must have been expensive," feeling. The question is...as always with those types of gifts, what could evoke that sort of response? It's almost always tougher to find a gift that appeals to sentiment for value, it really is. The sort of good thing is that the longer you've known someone, the larger a pool you have to draw ideas from when it comes to this kind of thing...and I've known Jen quite a while now. We had talked the summer before of having some fun. Specifically, we were sort of seriously contemplating the kind of fun involving the words 'kidnap' and 'garden gnomes'. Strictly in the name of fun I assure you. We were talking about how we could go around at night in a borrowed minivan of some sort and go kidnapping any garden gnome we could find. The plan then added trying to ransom the gnomes back to the owners...then it sort of evolved to switching gnomes instead of just kidnapping them. We were fairly close to pulling it off I swear...I don't know why it didn't actually happen. That kind of lead to the idea for her gift. To get her a gnome. Unfortunately...the question became how to find such a thing? David was around at the time and we went looking for a gnome together. Thing was, we couldn't find any at the normally expected places like Home Depot and such...eventually, worrying that I wouldn't end up finding it, we started checking the more...unlikelier of places. We ran into one at last at the Wall-Mart at Scarborough Town Center. The only problem was, it was a lot smaller than I wanted. I wanted one of those plastic-y garden gnomes that stand about knee high but the only ones we could find came up to about lower shin height and that wasn't too good. Wondering what I could do to remedy this situatin, I eventually struck upon the idea of caging her gnome. One of those nice, round and large birdcages would do the trick nicely. The only problem was that while the pet store at the bottom level of Town center had various cages, they were all too big and pricey while most of the ones in Wall-Mart were too small or in odd shapes. Eventually, I settled with a bird cage that was big enough to put the gnome inside but was half missing, so it was like a semi circle rather than a normal shape but it looked alright. A card caught David's eye that I went with, it was a green cucumber or zucchini with a caption saying something along the lines of, "bet you weren't expecting to get a cucumber as a birthday card were ya?" Her reaction to such gifts may be something better imagined than described. |