As another holiday season starts to wind down I find that I'm still not finished with my holiday gift shopping.  At this point it seems a little late to still be futzing around with gift shopping, but I'm only short one present.  My mother wanted a special kind of shampoo from an exclusive manufacturer, so off I went to the Internet to order the little bottle of pink stuff.  Imagine my frustration at finding that this particular shampoo is nowhere to be found.  I've searched a bunch of online stores that are supposed to carry the stuff and have come up empty.  Everybody is sold out, and now the holidays have come and gone and I still need a gift for my mother.

Somehow I can't help but think this is karma coming back around to poke at me.  As a child I relied on Nintendo Power's release calendar to know when to expect anticipated games in stores, and during the holidays I'd use that calendar to put together a wish list of most wanted games.  Since release lists were so unreliable back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I often sent my parents out on holiday shopping searches for games that weren't actually in stores yet (of course, at the time neither of us knew that the games weren't released).  I sent my parents out for Mega Man 3 in 1989, for instance.  They didn't have a chance in hell of finding it considering that it wasn't in stores until 1990.  Now fifteen years later here I am running in online circles after shampoo for my mother that seems to be completely unavailable.  I can't help but smirk at the parallels.