My First Birchbox (and, a Compelling Reason to Avoid Day Drinking)

Have you heard of Birchbox?

It's a monthly "beauty subscription" (for lack of a better term).  For $10 a month, you get a box full of surprise goodies, all girly and fabulous.  The beauty of this (ha!) is that you get to sample several things each month you might not normally buy for yourself (and it's nice stuff, we're not talking cheapish drugstore brands, although I kind of completely love those, myself).

Well, ladies (and gentlemen?) - I have been stalking my mail lady for days and the wait is finally over - I got my first Birchbox this weekend!  Wheeeee!

Ohhhhh, such fun!

Here's what I got: Ada Cosmetics bronzer, dirt luxe salt scrub in lemon leaf, Harvey Prince Eau Flirt perfume sample, theBalm cosmetics Stainiac in Beauty Queen (a lip/cheek stain), LARABAR vegan granola bar, Birchbox Exclusive ear buds.

I am most excited about the ear buds.  They fit perfectly in my miniature ears.  And they're pink.  It's like they knew I was at the gym on Friday cursing to myself because I lost my ear buds and had to borrow Charles' and they were too big and kept falling out during my favorite parts of "Call Me Maybe" and "Love You Like a Love Song."  Yeah...that actually happened.

You need an invitation to join, so if you want to join ask a friend who's already a member to send you one (or hit me up, I'll be happy to send you an invite!).  Once you sign up, you get on a waiting list (I was on it for maybe 2-3 weeks).  Then you get an email telling you it's time to enroll and you pay at that point.  You can buy any of the products (full-size versions) you receive (plus a bunch of other stuff, I believe).

Anyway.  I was (am!) really excited about it and wanted to share.

So that was the first part of my Saturday.

The second part was a day date with Charles, to celebrate his birthday.  We had planned on lunch but instead ended up at a pub, then a couple of antique shops, and then Central Market (a grocery store with a lot of specialty items that also sells wine and beer - that you can drink there).  Anyway, a couple of glasses of wine later and this lightweight's impulse buying was out of control.

Vegan vitamins?  Of course I need those!  Handmade, all-natural soap?  You bet that's coming home with us.  Expensive chocolate?  Uhhh, yes please.  Triple-cream salty brie?  YES, MA'AM.  And that's pretty much how the entire shopping trip went.  Which is all fine and dandy until you go to pay for all that stuff, and you realize that you've blown more than your entire food budget for the second half of the month in one trip.

But I learned my lesson.  After googling "do you eat the rind on brie?" for the definitive answer (no one seems to know and this has been an unsolved mystery of my adulthood), I learned that you do, indeed, eat the rind.  And eat the rind I did on the baked brie I devoured at the pub.  So yum, yum...a heaping scoop of extra creamy, briny brie purchased on a whim, spread all over an expensive cracker should be divine, right?

Oh God, no.  It wasn't.

I scooped an extra large helping onto my cracker, ate it, and promptly felt as if my entire head was filled with salt water (if you ever went to the beach as a kid and got knocked down by a giant wave and inhaled a pint of water or two...that's exactly the feeling I had after eating this brie).  I downed a handful of raspberries, some water, another cracker...nothing could soften the painful dry sensation in the back of my nose or cut through the salty taste.  

So let that be a lesson to all of you.  Day drinking = expensive shopping trips and briny brie.  But, boy was it fun!

Wine and beer, more wine and beer, a *very* full shopping cart, and checking out the record selection at the antique store.  WAIT - are records antiques??  Because I had records when I was a kid.

So, what's better - Birchbox or day drinking with the husband (I'm not sure I could pick!).