Gift cards and why they aren't a good gift. For me. That is.

I'm a hoarder when it comes right down to it. And this is why you should never ever give me a gift card as a gift.

Money isn't so good either. I'll hoard that as well. I can make a twenty last for a good few weeks, I tell you.

Add my son's gift cards to the hoard list. Because you just never know when 20 bucks at Target will come in handy. He still has his gift card from Gymboree his grandparents gave him for Christmas. I almost spent it once. Gymboree was having one of their super sales, and I got the e-mail really early. I hit the online store, started piling clothes in my shopping bag, most of which were for months down the road.

Then, like the good wife that I am, I waited until my husband got to work so I could send him links to everything so he could reject any of my choices. Lesson learned: Don't wait for anyone to get online so you can send links when a fabulous Gymboree sale is going on.

I went to my shopping bag, clicked on the first link, and it came up empty. I clicked on the second link; empty. I didn't get it. So then I went back to the sales page and sorted by the age range of the clothes I wanted to buy.

Yup, that's right, hardly anything came up.

Because I'm a big dummy and waited for my husband, other people snagged my items because nothing is really saved, even if you put it in your shopping bag.

So, long story short, I ended up buying nothing and I still have his gift card and I probably will for some time.

Yesterday was my 9-year wedding anniversary, and for "modern" times, 9 years means a leather gift. I got my husband a new iPod case, made of leather, thank you very much, and he got me an... electronic gift card. For iTunes. Which is great cause I love, love, love music, but not great because it was for 3o bucks (the limit I put on gifts), and 30 bucks means only three albums, and three albums out of a million I could possibly buy means I'm going to hoard, hoard and hoard some more.

My husband specified that I had to buy music for myself since we tend to buy things we both want. All day I was telling him what I could buy (The Lilys, The Microphones, Sun Kil Moon, Wolf Parade, Mum among many), and he was rooting me on, yeah, buy that, yeah, that's good, what about this? didn't you want that?

I never bought anything.

That night he kept bugging me: did you pick something yet? what're you going to buy? what about this?

I never bought anything.

This morning I was close to buying The Microphones, but Mateo woke up and so I abandoned my decision making.

Tonight I'm doing some random listening on Last.fm, and came across Tyler Ramsey, a folk musician whom I'm really digging, so I just bought that, and it's being downloaded right now. Now I only have 20 bucks, which means two albums, and a whole lot of thinking to do. I think I broke my hoarding record though by using a gift card a mere day after receiving it.