Uncommon Gift Ideas

Brrrrrr!

It’s very cold in Kansas City this morning!  We have such odd weather here in the midwest.  Yesterday morning when I left the house it was in the 60s.  So I only wore a light jacket to work.  Then the temperature dropped all day and by the time I left work it was about 40 degrees F.  I was shivering on my way out to my car!  I was totally unprepared for that.

This morning I am sitting here at my kitchen table enjoying a big bowl of maple-cinnamon-walnut oatmeal and a glass a juice.  It just looks cold outside through the back door.  I can’t see the dogs anywhere, so I bet they are snuggled up together in the dog house.  I am up a little earlier than usual this morning so I thought I would do some blogging.  The only thing missing from this situation is a big cup of coffee.  But I didn’t make any so I’ll have to get some at work.

So Thanksgiving is THIS WEEK.  Can you believe it?  I always feel like the holidays sneak up on me.  A lot of people have already started their holiday shopping (cough…not me….cough) and a lot of people will be beginning or continuing that shopping this weekend.  I haven’t decided if I am shopping this weekend or not.  It depends on if there is anything really good in the ads.  Good enough for me to fight all the crowds, traffic and lines.  We’ll see.

Anyway last night I got this really neat catalog in the mail and after going through it, decided I wanted to share it on my blog.  It’s from a store called Uncommon Goods.  Have you ever heard of it?  I hadn’t until I saw this catalog.  Who knows how I got on the mailing list, but in this case I’m actually glad another store sold my name and address!

After reading about the company, I found that Uncommon Goods has some great attributes that I like:

• All merchandise is produced without harm to animals
• Catalogs are printed on recycled paper and many products are made from recycled materials
• A portion of each order is donated to non-profit organizations

Besides all that, there are some really neat products in the catalog (and on the website)!  Here are some of my favorites so far:

Recycled Windshield Goblets

These glasses are made from recycled car windshields and windows.  There are also several other types of glasses, vases and jewlery made from recycled windshields on the website.

Unzipped Glass Zipper Bag

This glass bowl looks like a plastic zippered bag.  Ha!  This would be fun for someone’s desk at work.

Inconvenient Kitty Tumblers

These glasses have pictures of cats doing annoying “cat” activities.  I found them hilarious since I have four cats.  The uninvited guest one is perfect for this house.  The cats are always jumping on our laps while we are eating no matter how many times we swat them down!  In fact one of them just tried to get on my lap just now.

These three are only a small few of the products I loved from this catalog.  I am going to shop around the website some more this week so see if there is anything for anyone on my gift list.  If you have shopped with Uncommon Goods before, tell me, how was your experience?  How is the quality of the products? 

And I apologize but I am having issues putting up links in my blog posts this week.  WordPress seems to have changed the linking process and I can’t seem to get it to work sometimes!  The very first link I put up went through just fine, but the individual links to the products apparently don’t like me.  If you are interested in these products just go to the Uncommon Goods website and you can easily find them by searching by the product name.