vicarious shopping

Today I learned that you can repair a bumpy track on a sliding glass door by procuring a steel sleeve thingy that fits over the dinged-up track. Thus I also learned that:

• You can save a bunch of money this time of year buying things that are, in general, thoughtful but completely useless Christmas presents. Need a Dremel attachment to reshape your dinged-up door track so the sleeve will fit? Why buy one thing for $8 when you can buy more parts than you could possibly ever need for $15? Actually, we'll probably need them. Some of our do-it-yourself projects involved modeling parts with play dough, so I don't see why we wouldn't need all 43 Dremel attachments.
• If you fix a door that didn't ever slide well, when it does slide well, it surprises you every time you use it, thus demonstrating that door-opening-memory is very, very short.
• If you beg the people at Lowe's to price match something you really, really don't want to go into Home Depot for, if they make some phone calls, it can happen.