By The Yard: Lunch Hour Shop Hop
Posted by Jen Lopez on Sep 18th 2019
Just like everyone says calories don’t count if they are consumed while on vacation, I’m going to contend that fabric shopping doesn’t count if you do it on your lunch hour. I used to work a very stressful job for a high tech company. Although the company was huge, our particular office was small and we didn’t even have a cafeteria. This meant you had to either go out to lunch every day or eat at your desk. I wasn’t about to do the later, because eating at your desk just meant other half hour of people coming to my desk to bug me. It was the polar opposite of a “break”. So I opted to “go out” most days.
One day, while stuck at a traffic light on the way to work, I noticed a little shop in the downstairs of an old building that I’d never noticed before. It was a quilt shop! Moreover, it was a quilt shop I’d never been to. I vowed to sneak over there during lunch as soon as I could get away. It took several days to break out and make the trip thanks to my office’s egregious penchant for booking meetings during the lunch hour. When I finally made it over there, it was probably the tiniest quilt shop I’d ever been to but still it was quite lovely. At the time, it was getting close to Christmas so made a habit of stocking up on cute fat quarters of snowy landscapes and trees. I was careful to never spend more than I would have spent had I eaten lunch at one of the local fast food eateries so I never felt one bit of guilt about it. Getting a chance to get away from my desk and indulge in some mental creativity was well worth the modest expense.
Sadly, that little shop closed only a year or so after I found it. I still fondly remember my many trips there and how refreshed I felt after my lunch hour shop hops.
Please join us here every other Wednesday for another fun, fiber-filled installment of By the Yard. You can read more from By the Yard and find more comics, including the By the Yard 2020 Wall Calendar for Quilters at: www.bytheyardcomics.com.
