The fine art of shopping

An early test picture taken at NL Farm in Arai

Still catching up with myself!

Last week after my picture taking adventure on Sunday (a week and a half ago now) Ritsy and I went to the local Electronics shop- Yamada. Let me backtrack a bit for a moment. About 2 or so years ago, I had finally managed to remove myself from the world of using consumer debt and did not ever want to go back to relying on it. Consumer debt is a neat little trap that a lot of us fall into when we are young and become to depend and rely on from the time, when college aged, that we are able to get our first Visa card. When I finally paid off my Visa card- Ritsy and I decided to save in advance of making big purchases instead of buying first and paying off later. Every month the two of us set aside 10,000 yen (roughly $100 CAD) each towards the big purchase fund, and have already been able to make some upgrades around the house. Last week we had enough for the Dyson Vacuum cleaner that we wanted- roughly 80,000 yen. To make a long story short, we only ended up spending about 45,000 on the vacuum thanks to a sale and our point card (which was worth 150% of the points we had).

Excited that we were walking out with some money in our hands, I mentioned to Ritsy that I wanted a new digital camera and wanted to take a look. Again making a long story short I ended up buying a new camera as well. Many of my students had recommended Cannon for quality, but I didn't choose their top of the line models- the Powershot, I went for a compact version of their Ixy camera- named the L4 here in Japan (IXUS i7 zoom in Canada). It is compact, has a good Megapixel rate, has many picture modes, and can film some good quality video shots- so I think the camera will prove to be a good pickup.

Naturally in the end, I will personally refund the money into the big purchase fund for our next target, a washer/drier, should be able to get it about this time next year maybe....