Saturday Gift Post--Outdoor Fun Stuff Convinces me to Get Outdoors, So I'm Shockingly Not at Boswell Today. I'm Not Even in Milwaukee.

I write this on my way to Chicago, where I am hoping to walk around and visit bookstores and other retail and get some ideas for Boswell. I’m sort of surprised that to find myself with a day off, and though I would normally work anyway, I’ve had a tradition to go somewhere else on my birthday, and this is the first one since we’ve opened where I wasn’t scheduled, and then my offsite fell through too.

Over the last week, we’ve finally been getting in our outdoorsy stuff that I ordered last winter. Oops, probably could have used that a month ago. Being that it’s our fourth spring, I wanted to switch things up a bit and try a few new vendors. It's not that I don't love the one that seems to be in every bookstore, no matter how small. There’s reason for that—it’s good stuff, well priced, with decent terms, and perky phone sales folk. But like any vendor, it starts to get repetitive, and you wonder how many times I can sell the same turtle kick ball.

That said, I still bought the turtle disc flyer. But I went to another vendor for a robot kickball. But their kickballs don’t come blown up. So last Sunday, after three booksellers and two pumps, we finally blew up our robots.

I may still bring in some (turtle) bubble product from them, but for now, I have inexpensive ice-cream-scented bubble cones. I think the ice cream is the wand and the cone is the holder, but I haven't unwrapped one to see. I could distinctly smell the pistachio, but Stacie mostly smelled plastic wrap.

I bought some globe balls for our Earth Day table, which is appropriate in some ways (earth awareness) and inappropriate in others (this product is probably not the best thing for the earth--life is nothing if not filled with contradictions). But our new bird kaleidoscopes are made in the United States, mostly of cardboard, so that’s probably good, in terms of shipping anyway. Maybe it's even recycled. Maybe partly.

And I don’t know what the eye balls are for, so they are at the front desk. A customer bought one for her husband’s lunch box. It bounces pretty well too.