It’s good to have friends.
It’s good to be up for doing something that your friend, who may or may not be a bit of a decorating nut, wants to do.
It’s good to keep an open mind while doing that which your friend, who is on to a good idea even if it is a bit whacked, decides that she needs help doing.
So with the foregoing in mind, here’s what my friend and I did.
• • •
We went to the region’s largest liquor store [an acre+] and we window-shopped for bottles of booze that would look good in my friend’s house on a silver tray placed on a dark wooden table, by the brick fireplace in the living room, with the walls painted dark barn red.
Keep in mind that even though we were in the store for an hour, we did not buy any liquor. Instead, we picked up pretty bottles of booze*, put them in our cart, and then occasionally stopped to create a pretend display of the various bottles so that we could see how they looked grouped together.
• • •
From the above experience I can confirm for you that if you are in a liquor store and want the employee’s to pay attention to you, do what we did. They were attentive to our every move; asking us frequently if we needed some help. Eyeballing us like we were inept shoplifters in training.
Not that I blame the employees: who in their right mind goes window shopping for booze? Answer: two middle-aged woman with a penchant for decorating and the desire to make things look hospitable.
Who else would?
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* In case you were wondering, pretty bottles included:
- distinct graphics [Knob Creek Bourbon];
- traditional bottle shapes [Grey Goose Vodka];
- this color of blue [Bombay Sapphire Gin];
- this reddish, not blackish, color of brown [Woodford Reserve Bourbon, not Kahlua]; and
- these gold, not red, bottle tops [Chambord, not Maker’s Mark Bourbon].
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 
