Clear Blue Dei

Here comes another Christmas and we all wonder what to get the hard-to-please among our family and friends.  Well, good old Archie McPhee still isn’t letting us down! Despite the fact that they no longer carry the Illustrated Librarian  line of temporary tattoos (perfect for the librarian on your list), they do have a nice “Read or Die” shopping bag  which is new.  For other librarian(and zombie)  related items  you can check out my post Librarians and Zombies: Novel Presents You will Love (and some librarian trivia)

And while I am mentioning past posts with shopping ideas, here is my post on the Keyringer, a useful item for finding your keys and other lost things. I got one and used it to attach to my dad’s remote at the nursing home so I could find it when it got lost (as it frequently did). It worked well and was a good idea, however, the batteries seem to have died pretty quickly and I have to reorder some more. Update: got batteries and opened the non-working one and it only had 1 battery in it. Not sure where the other one went, possibly taken out for something else at the nursing home? In any case, I think the batteries would still be working in both of them if the one had both batteries!  The beep is louder now though since I put new ones in. So I still like and recommend them.

And have you (or a “friend”) ever felt uncomfortable going “commando” under your gloves or even worse, having your whole hands, just as the good lord made them, flapping around for all to see?  Then you will definitely want a pair of handerpants for Christmas.  And you can wear them under gloves for a little extra warmth and security. Now if only they made handdresses. Or handskirts, that would be pretty! Hear that Archie? A little lace handskirt would be very nice.

Moving on, my next pick for a great place to shop is ThinkGeek.  For a practical gift, this really caught my eye.  Who wouldn’t want a watch with a built-in USB drive? Well, maybe not everyone, but I know I would. Seriously, I really would. I think this is really neat and I especially like that it is an analog watch. Digital watches just tell you what time it is now, analog watches tell you where you are in relationship to the daily flow of time.  At least that is how I see it.

Or for a more esoteric (yet still fun and definitely geeky) idea, there are the interactive t-shirts. My favorites in these are definitely the Electronic Rock Guitar shirt and the Electronic Drum Kit shirt.  Get a couple of people wearing these and you have a band! I like the idea of the guitar shirt, but I have to admit, I think the drums are the bee’s knees!  I almost got one until my husband mentioned that I might not want to be messing with my “cymbals”  in public.  I guess that is a good point. I hadn’t really thought of it. Anyway, here is a video of the Electronic Drum shirt in action:

And if you know someone whose look would be complete if they only had a grill, here are some very reasonably priced grillz. And they are all one-size-fits-all.  I am partial to the golden style blue domination premium grill. Only $49.99 and unique enough that your friends probably don’t already have this. But hurry, they are almost sold out! Or if they have all the grills they need, maybe a pimp cup would be the thing. Again, extremely reasonable prices, for the budget conscious pimp. These are all from IcedOutGear.

And for those of us who live and breathe social media and who need a little splash of color for their chair or couch, visit Craftsquatch, for all the social media icons, in pillow form.  They have the twitter bird, the RSS icon, the facebook icon and more. Show your love of your favorite social networking sites and tools, through interior decorating.

And  if that all wasn’t enough, here is a whole bunch more geek (gamer) related items from Split Reason, Gear for Geeks and Gamers.  The +15 frost resistant beanie is one of my favorite items from this store. Who doesn’t need one of those?

And one last idea, one that my husband has on his wish list. How about a nice bow tie from Absolute ties?  Sean wants one in his school colors (which “coincidentally” is also the Hogswart school colors. He “says” he went to school in “New Zealand”…) For the true bow tie person, they would only want one that you tie yourself. Sean still takes a while to get it tied, but he is working on it. Practice makes perfect.  I’ll bet you didn’t know that the bow tie is going to be the next big thing in men’s office apparel. Well it is if Sean has any say about it.  At least it is becoming a trend among the male library types. Well, it might…

Happy holidays and take care,

~Susan Mellott

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