I've grown accustomed to this purse?

I may have moaned and gritched about this. If so, I've slept since then. The 20th anniversary (with the corporation) gift which I chose was a designer bag, of the brand which Firstborn prefers. I didn't open the box for something like a week. When I did, the purse was smaller than I'd envisioned, and I certainly couldn't lug all the stuff that I was accustomed to. And I wasn't sure that I liked it all that much. It retailed for nearly half again as much as the bag I chose five years ago, which is hanginging dejectedly from a knob on one of my dressers, whimpering in leathery tones, "Don't you love me anymore?"

There are a few things that I'm discovering that I like about the new bag. It fits neatly under my arm and stays on my sloping shoulder, probably because it weighs five pounds max, and not fifteen. Like me, it has a quirky shape. It's black, so it works for work or church or family brunch at IKEA.

I'm hard on bags. My favorite was a large red leather tote from Franklin (as in Franklin Planner) that I bought half-off at a price that nearly choked me. And was a fraction of what either of these bags would retail for. Good purses, like good steaks, should cost less than $10. Right? I stuffed that bag like a pregnant elephant, and it lasted at least five years. The bag which is in timeout no longer stands tall like a soldier on review. It bulges out on the front and back. It has hourglass creases on the sides. And it probably has another 15-20 years of usefulness left. I'm wondering how well this fancier bag will last. It's more delicately constructed.

In other news, if you start drinking 64 ounces of water a day, and one day you drink half that much, your hands and forearms will tattle on you. I'm naming the left one Mojave and the other one Sahara.