A $30 gift card to Dillards is a dangerous thing. Especially when there's a clearance sale with 75% mark-down and 40% off that! I wound up with a few shirts that could be worn at work or as dressy-casual.
But the real joy in spending money that's already "spent" in the form of a gift card came in browsing the "gift" racks. Now, these are the sort of shelves they pull out before Father's Day and Christmas, and they have the genre of gifts which I call Gifts For Dad Who Already Has Everything He Wants Except Perhaps A New Power Tool Which Is Too Expensive For Me To Buy. These displays are filled with the unique and the exotic for home & office: the miniature putting kit for the office, the felt-lined wooden caddy for wallet and keys, the set of three golf balls imprinted with World's Best Dad, the nose hair trimmer with mini razor, and the digital wine ratings and reviews catalog.
Now, while most of these gifts are utterly useless when it comes to finding a meaningful gift for Dad, one in particular caught my eye. A humidor/poker kit. It's interesting these should be combined in one product, as I can't imagine any cigar afficionado wanting his cigars mingling with a deck of cards and stack of chips. I suppose some slightly self-righteous marketer likes to direct his pitches toward those with multiple vices. This might explain the recent ad I saw stating, "Free bottle of 1998 vintage Pinot Noir with purchase of two Nascar tickets." But I digress...
The shoebox-sized wooden humidor seemed to have excellent craftmanship and an appreciably sturdy weight to it. When I'd looked at humidors a year ago, everything seemed to be in the $100 range. This baby, complete with dice and two decks of cards, was marked down from $80 to $12. It now has a place of prominence on my dresser, waiting only to be filled. No longer shall my cigars dry out before I have a chance to smoke them!
7 comments:
Now, Jonathan, I felt quite sure that you were going to end your entry with the words "Now I have a nice gift for my dear father, who happens to have a set of cigars still tightly wrapped, since he doesn't want them to dry out."
Dad
It's bigger in real life than I expected.
-DH
What are the round things? Does it have a hydrogenating brick?
The dark one on the left is a humidifier. I think it has a sponge in it that will slowly release moisture. And the one on the right is a hygrometer which measures humidity. (I'm not sure how these things work. I remember middle-school science class where we made devices which held two thermometers and could be spun. One thermometer was surrounded by a damp cloth. As the water evaporated as the thermometers were spun around, one cooled faster than the other. The difference in temperatures could be used to measure ambient humidity. Perhaps this little device in the picture has something similar inside.)
what I really want to know is if that do-not-resuscitate patient's heart is still beating...
the era's getting old, man you need to update
I agree...time to enter a new era of blogging here......your rabid fans are in starvation mode
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