Shopping 101

Well, we went shopping today. Carole and I went to see her mom as we try to do at least once a week. There is a mall near her house so we stopped off there to do some Christmas shopping. It wasn't too bad, I have to say. The traffic was bearable and it was easy to find parking and there wasn't an absolute crush of humanity in the mall itself. So it was actually a pleasant experience.

I suffer from SDD--Shopping Deficit Disorder. Like most men I'm just not into shopping. I don't understand how women get such a kick out of it. So I try to find a nice place where I be a bit of a vegetable and watch the human beings and maybe read a book. This was easy to do because they have a Borders Bookstore in there and we nabbed some cookbooks and novels as gifts and--since two of the books were MY gifts--I read part of one of them (Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN'S UNION: A Novel). Looking forward to Christmas morning when I can unwrap that one and read it for real.

I also like to go into malls from time to time because they're the best places to watch people. All kinds of people. Especially pretty women. All the pretty women go shopping in malls. Yep, I'm a lout. "Is that all you care about? Looking at women's breasts?" my wife complains. No, there are always their asses, too.

The food court. We stopped here and had a tad to eat.

This was some kind of Santa bubble. People were lined up here and they'd go inside and have photos taken of their kids sitting on Santa's lap. I think the crazy thing was sponsored by the movie studio that makes those damnable Narnia movies.

I called this one "The Orca Dress". Carole was not amused.

We found a store in there that sells absolutely nothing but Hello Kitty shit. For real.

This is the Borders Books where we spent some money buying Christmas gifts for ourselves and for others. It was really busy in there. I was impressed.