Window shopping around the holidays can be great, as long as you’re into masochism. Joking aside, I actually really enjoy strolling through shopping centers so I can ooh and aah at all of the stuff I will not be buying. Today we went to Kingston with my mother-in-law, mostly to get the battery in my husband’s iPhone replaced — more on that in a bit — but it was also a good chance to get out of the house for the day.

Seeing as it’s the last weekend before Christmas, everyone and their mother’s great aunt Betty had the brilliant idea to go shopping, and, luckily for us, we had the pleasure of dealing with all of them! Seriously, I always underestimate the amount of people that turn out to shop on the weekends and every time I kick myself for not thinking ahead. Either way, it’s a good thing we didn’t have any gifts to buy or else we would have spent the majority of our time waiting in checkout lines.

So, on to the real reason we went to Kingston. Last weekend we went to the Apple store to get my husband’s iPhone battery replaced, and since they didn’t have the battery in stock they had to order it, which took a week. Today was supposed to be really simple: drop off the phone at the Apple store, pick it up in two hours, and never have to deal with a dead battery at 30%! Unfortunately, the phone had water damage inside so Apple couldn’t replace the battery without fixing the water damage. What’s even worse is that the cost of repairing the water damage is around £224! Of course that’s way cheaper than just buying a new phone, but we don’t have that kind of money lying around this time of year. So in the end, we declined Apple’s offer to repair the water damage for £224 so that they could replace the battery in my husband’s phone, which means that once we finally decide to get the phone taken care of we’ll have to go through the whole process again. Yikes.

I mean, I’m just annoyed that we’ve gone so far out of our way to get this sorted and yet we’ve hit another road block. It’s frustrating that the phone isn’t fixed, but at least we got to spend the day moseying around the shops in Kingston!