Saturday 4 Mar 06

Today we have Visit the Mall on our schedule, the Treasure Coast Mall owned by Simon, who also owns the Springfield, Ohio, Mall, and many others. Now i've always maintained, for all the good it's done me, that i am not like other men because i shop, i talk, and i genuinely like women! A friend of mine once said, women love sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made! So i go with my parents shopping with no idea in mind of what i might buy or even look for. i end up finding 2 new volumes of Spider-man comic book reprints--they take full-size color comics and reprint them bound together 3/4 size in black-and-white, and i'll buy them!--and i also need some protector for my cigarettes now that i'm wearing shorts so i manage to find a metal cigarette case on sale. i probably should not have bought it because

1. yes, it has a small picture from the wizard of oz of dorothy and the wicked witch which is cool, but it also has a caption under the pic "don't make me get the flying monkeys!" which is neither a line from the movie or the book and hardly makes any sense. one wonders whether the person, probably a plant manager in some foreign country, has ever seen the movie; and

2. since fewer people smoke these days but cigarette case makers still gotta eat, they have rearranged the straps to go long ways on the small chance that someone will actually use these cases to hold library cards and drivers licences. unfortunately that pretty much ruins them for holding cigarettes. yes, the case has the room inside to hold almost a whole pack of smokes, 9 on each side, but as there is nothing to hold the cigarettes on their side, when you open it, they all fall out.

still it has a nice pic from the wizard of oz so i went ahead and bought it.

now a major part of the enjoyment of going to the mall is people-watching, and i favor watching members of the female persuation. there are certainly pretty women here in sunny florida, but there are pretty women everywhere, in a delightful variety of colors, and my observation is that here there are fewer blondes and more darker women, more from the latin and asian gene pools than back home. there was, however, a blonde who came out of the book store just as i was leaving, who had about 85% of her body uncovered, just wearing sneakers, tiny shorts, and a tiny top (in terms of coverage, not size)! maybe she was on her way to a gym...did you know the word gymnasium comes from the greek word meaning "to train naked"? *sigh*

last time i was here i got a fantastic buy on blank dvd+rw from office max, and a phenomenal bargain on some close-out post-its from office depot...or was it the other way around? this year i had to check them out because they are both a block from the mall, but no bargains.

my parents are healthy and doing all right but their day seems to go from meal to meal. perhaps they've always been that way, and perhaps my unstructured bachelor lifestyle has lead me in the other direction, but they had breakfast, then a big lunch at the food court, and then at 530p we had dinner! i said that if dinner hadn't been served until 9p i wouldn't have minded! i will get home so overfed i won't need to eat for a week!