Spoiled for choice

When you order breakfast in this country, you are often met with a barrage of questions.  Americans seem to take it in their stride but I, like most Brits I know, find it overwhelming.

Choosing windows is a bit like that. There are so many more options than we had imagined. We thought we wanted steel framed windows, but it turns out they're beyond our budget. So we browsed aluminium and wood frames. We looked at ones with leading ('muntins' in American) and ones without. We considered windows you open with a crank and ones you open by pushing them out.  We reviewed retractable screens as well as the fixed kind. We weighed up sliding versus concertina french windows. And all of that was before we got onto how big they needed to be.

In a way it was worse than the 'Choice Hellhole' of a breakfast order, because some of these window options were a dead-end. They'd never say 'oh if you want sausage then you have to have rye toast', would they? Actually, they would in England but that's another story. But the windows guy did say that if we want the push out kind of windows, we have to have retractable screens.

The whole shopping trip took three hours. And that's just the research so we can get some rough pricing. The final decisions are yet to be made.

The strange thing was that I enjoyed it. It was the most exciting meeting I've ever been in. I felt elated, almost slightly intoxicated - my pulse was racing, I was leaning forward in my seat, my heart pounding, loving the rapid fire questions and the quick back and forth. I may not have been born to shop but I think I was been born to explore complicated purchasing decisions.

 Next we get to do the same sort of research into plumbing and appliances, and I, for one, can't wait.