Technical Difficulties

I have lurkers! I'm so excited...lurkers--lovely people who just read to read. It's like the coolest thing EVER!!! (Ego trip much, Amy? No thanks...I just went.) Anyway, yesterday my buddy and I went a.m. shopping with the other mental cases--it's sort of a tradition with us, and yesterday went sort of like clockwork--right down to the declined credit card that should have been wide open and free as a bird so I had to used the cash card instead and now, hello, we're broke. I would have been terribly embarrassed by that moment except my buddy pulled the ultimate in holiday shopping insanity about two years ago, and after that moment I've been sort of numb to the mortification that participation in Black Friday exposes you to. The incident went like this:

Barb, my shopping buddy, decided that we absolutely had to go to J.C. Penny's for a magic pair of jeans that actually fit her. Since Barb is nearly six feet tall, with an impossibly skinny waist and an oddly wide pair of hips (Zero body fat, people...Z-E-R-O!) this is a big deal, so in spite of the fact that we'd already hit Target, Toys'R'Us and Starbucks, we hauled our sleep-deprived psyches into a (gasp, shudder) department store. And as we looked, fruitlessly, for the men's sections, Barb bitched loudly and truclulently about how, if this place didn't have a men's department, then it was going straight to hell, just like Macy's, which was also in the same mall. She cornered a poor little sales girl and asked her that question, practically bringing the poor girl to tears as she wanted to know why in the hell J.C. Penny's would put their men's dept. down at the other end of the mall, like the detested Macy's. I should have stopped her--honestly, I should have, but I was too wierded out by the people shooting perfume and the fact that every department neatly matched or coordinated with the passing one to actually be coherent--we'd been shopping for nearly six hours at this point, and that alone had pretty much cauterized the functioning neurons in my cortex as it was. So after bringing the bewildered girl to tears, I grabbed Barb and said, "c'mon--if it's not here, we can't will it here...let's go find the men's department of Penny's for sweet heaven's sake, okay?"

Can you see the punchline coming? I couldn't. Until we passed a price scanning kiosk that read Macy's on it. I stopped and looked. Barb stopped and looked. Then we walked the remaining 25 feet out of the store and turned in tandem to look at the name above the arch. Yeah. This place had a separate men's department like Macy's because IT WAS MACY'S.

We've pretty much stopped after Target ever since that day. And if the sales girl is out there, I'd like to profoundly apologize on the behalf of my friend--she's really not a lunatic bitch, I swear she's a good person. Honest.

Anyway, we got back home and I took a nappy-poo, and when I woke up (with the baby, who also took a nap w/me) everybody else was out watching Happy Feet (I understand it's a very good movie. Kewyn slept through it.) so I unloaded the car. And unloaded. And unloaded. I hid the kid's stuff in closets and under cribs (like the baby knows what's under her bed anyway!) and set aside the stuff that was for other people's kids next to the couch, along with the excessive bags of chocolate that go into little tiny bags for friends, co-workers, my kids' friends, and people who give me gifts when I wasn't expecting them. Pre-K (before Kewyn!) I used to sew those bags and although I still have an entire lexan of holiday cloth, I don't think I'll get to do that again anytime soon--now, those bags are chocolate. But (and again, people without kids have probably caught on to the flaw in my plan already, while people with kids are currently laughing their asses off at me) I didn't count on the fact that what I bought for the two little boys in Pennsylvania would be equally appealing to the cave-troll in California, and now I have to go shopping again because Kewyn has a new guy. So does Trystan, because if Kewyn got to open one, heaven forbid Trystan go without the other one...Nick, Max, if your mama is reading, don't worry--magna-guys are still available at Toys'R'Us.

So, aside from those technical difficulties, I'm still having e-mail problems from when we had to completely switch hard-drives because my lap-top cooked my last one (I was mid-book edit...it took everything I had to not dissolve into a gibbering goosemonkey until my husband assured me that I wouldn't have to type all 720 pages back into the computer, cannyagimmehalelluiaamen.) Don't worry, though, if you're trying to get in touch w/me--my e-mail should be up again by tomorrow--but then, like everything else, it may still be subject to technical difficulties.