New Beads ( and a new phone)

My husband bribed me into getting a new cell phone yesterday. He said he would take the day off work (I should have been suspicious about that!) and we would go out for brunch and then shopping at whatever quilt and/or bead stores I wanted to visit. I was so excited and spent lots of time this week thinking about which new stores I wanted to see and what route to take. I had my selections carefully balanced with 2 new (to me) quilt stores and 3 bead stores. But when friday morning came, he said we first were going to buy me a new cell phone. I protested in vain, as I quickly realized what he was up to!

My family has been after me for a long time to get a new cell phone, but I liked my old one. I didn't mind that it couldn't hold a charge for more than 1 or 2 calls, or that it didn't get good reception outside of my town, and I really didn't care that it was a little larger than most cell phones these days, or that it was costing me as much as 2 modern cell phones! The children called it "Mom's Flintstone Phone" and begged me not to take it out in public to make phone calls! So after making hundreds of decisions about which phone company to use, and comparing prices and service bundles, and selecting options ....which was exactly the reason I didn't want to waste my time thinking about all of this technobabble in the first place, we finally picked 2 phones, a plan (the family plan with unlimited calling between my phone and the kids' phone), the accessories (here is a whole new genre of products I never knew existed!), the options (no, I really don't need another camera, blue teeth or texting options), and...well, you can probably guess that there were went my morning of shopping at quilts stores! Here are my old and new phones...can you tell which is which?!?!

Anyway, I did finally get to shop in the afternoon, so I had to pare down my shopping list considerably and was able to find a couple of shops that were new to me. One of them was Beads of Colour which was a little shop that we drove by twice, but once we found the shop and some parking, discovered that this store had lots of character and a wonderful selection of unusual beads. This was WAY more fun than shopping for a cell phone!! Here are some of the beads I bought. I bought many other things for a new project that I will tell you about another time, but they didn't photograph very well...too shiny.

So...my list of other stores to visit will have to wait for another day, but now I can easily call ahead to get directions - using my new cell phone - which actually works!