gotta be the shoes. this may not mean much to you if you're not shopping obsessed, but i bought sixteen pairs of shoes and eight pairs of pants/board shorts yesterday. that's right. sixteen shoes, eight board shorts. all for the ultra low price of thirty two dollars -- total. what? how can this be? am i buying used second-hand crap clothes? nope. i bought next season's hit clothes at bargain prices. could life get any better?

before this fortuitous friday, i was in a clothing slump. clothing costs so much nowadays and the desire to buy anything priced over twenty dollars had to be curtailed. but going to the ripcurl sample sale solved all of that.

word had spread throughout the day of a sample sale down the street from my work. when i first got there, i was excited just to see ten dollar board shorts and ten dollar pairs of shoes. but as the end of the sale neared, the prices kept dropping. five dollars for shoes. five dollars for board shorts. then two dollars for board shorts. then one dollar for a pair of shoes. by the time i heard that shoes were a dollar, i had already outfitted myself with a huge box and had started grabbing any matching shoes that i could get my hands on. it's amazing how good so-so shoes can look when they're priced to buy.

one thing about sample sales, all the sizes are uniform and if you're not that size, tough. i wear size 32 waist and have size 9 shoes. guess what the sample sizes were? yup, as it turns out, i am the perfect sample size. there is a shopping god. on other thing, sample sale shoes usually have a hole drilled through the soles. so you have to get rubber cement to fix up the hole, but that's a small price to pay for new shoes.

did i ever tell you that my number one clothing goal is to own tons of shoes?

grabbing clothes without a care about the price is the most liberating thing ever. need to double up on some shoes -- one for wearing, one for backup/display? do it, it's only a dollar. i was shaking from the aftermath of buying so much and spending so little. we literally were the last people in line. we closed out the sample sale. and now we're practically sponsored by ripcurl, my new favorite brand.

i wanted to post pictures of my box of shoes, but i gave most of them away. i was too excited to have shoes and shorts to give away that i forgot to take pictures. but rest assured, on the feet and surrounding the loins of all of my friends, rests the plunder of two hours at the sample sale. best day ever.