Walking Backwards

Hmmmm . . . my entry from Friday didn't post. Too bad, because it was cool. Not because of the content of course, but because Nicholas did something to my keyboard, I have no idea what, that started scrolling my text backwards. Everything was written the wrong way, which was cool, but annoying. When I tried to enter a web address into the address bar it came out as moc.reggolb.www. You can imagine what my entry looked like. Nicholas has the amazing ability to hit hot keys that I didn't even know existed. I even asked my husband and et al computer geeks and they had no idea either. We figured that it had something to do with character encoding, but none of the changes I made did anything to solve my problem. So I ended up falling back on the standard protocol for fixing unknown origin Windows problems - reboot. Seems to have worked.


Yesterday was my day to get out of the house and run errands. I know of about thirty other ways I would rather spend my Saturday, but things have been such that my free time now is taken up by what "has" to be done. I'm leaving in two and half weeks and I still have about 75% of stuff-that-needs-to-get-done to do. Yesterday, the morning was spent at the mall and the afternoon was spent trying to find the stuff I couldn't find at the mall at other stores all over the place.

The mall was - like a mall. It wasn't crowded when I got there, but by the time I left it was overrun. For some reason I was targeted by every single kiosk sales person and was asked if I wanted to try nail care products or knock-off sunglasses or hair extensions. I would cut through stores whenever I could, but I had to practice the oblivious-maneuver on several. No matter how loudly or proximal they spoke, I would not acknowledge their existence. I had a shopping agenda. Sadly, the mall was not equipped to satisfy my agenda. I went for a bra (note the maximum nipple coverage)and a simple black dress that was fairly wrinkle-resistant. I left with a bra and haunting visions of myself in flower-printed chiffon. Not one store had the dress I was looking for. No, I didn't want an asymmetrical hem with gauze overlay. No, I didn't want transparent sleeves. No, for the love of God, I didn't want metallic threads or sequins. I just wanted a comfortable travel dress. Is that too much to ask? Apparently.

After I left the mall I went to what seemed like a thousand other stores and still didn't find anything. I even entered the horrors known as Dress Barn, and they didn't have anything even close. There was a lot of polyester animal print, though. I have given up finding the dress at this point and am just going to get some nice pants and a fancy-schmancy shirt. Now to find that.