Friday, March 18

Up at 6:30 this morning, so I could get ready for a trip a couple of hours south to meet Daughter for a shopping expedition. What a gorgeous day for an outing! It started a bit cool, so I wore a cotton sweater, but by noon, the temperature rose into the high 70s.

I took six music CDs to enjoy while traveling down and back, which was exactly enough to satisfy the four hours I was on the road. Along the way, there was road working going on, which necessitated one-lane traffic sometimes, but it didn't slow me down appreciably. I still arrived at the shopping strip mall area at 10 a.m.

As soon as I arrived, I called Daughter, without success. She'd changed her cell phone number, which, she said, she'd given me the last time she visited our house. But I failed to get it into my cell phone. We finally made contact, though. Turned out, she was already in the first store I wanted to visit, as was I, but we were in two different places.

Daughter had brought along my twelve-year-old great-grandson, who was out of school today. I thought that shopping with two women looking for clothing would be terribly boring for Great-Grandson, but he seemed perfectly content. He made frequent excursions to other parts of the stores to look around.

I bought a couple of blouses at the first store, after which we traveled across town to a buffet restaurant, because Great-Grandson said he wanted a salad. After lunch, we went back across town to a hobby shop, where I bought several glue sticks of the sort that Mother prefers to use in card making and scrapbooking, and a punch that makes a lacy edge, purchased on behalf of our scrapbook club for our card making community project.

Then we went back to the strip mall, where we shopped in three more stores. I found two winter mock turtlenecks in one of the stores, for $3 each. One is for Mother. In the next store, I found a chambray shirt with three-quarter length sleeves. At the third store, I found a dressy outfit...jacket, slacks, and shell. Great-Grandson put his stamp of approval on this outfit, which he thinks is properly dignified for his great-grandmother.

The jacket to the outfit is light brown, with cuffed three-quarter length sleeves. The bottom of the jacket hits just below the waistline, and the front is detailed with a subtle ruffle up the front and around the neck, which is the same material as the jacket. I paired the jacket with light brown slacks, and a glossy gold stretch-crepe shell.

Our last stop was a variety store, where none of us found anything we wanted. By this time, it was about 3 p.m., and Daughter needed to get ready to go to work, and I wanted to get on the road home before the evening commuters clogged the highways.

I was home just after 5 p.m. As soon as I came in the house, Mother and Hubbie related an incident that happened while I was gone. Seems that shortly after they'd come inside after working in the raised veggie gardens, a truck, traveling around 60 miles an hour, we suspect, lost a wheel, which sailed into our yard, traveled between two trees, narrowly missing the tulip bed, proceeded between two yucca plants, traveled up a pile of dirt, catapulted onto a couple of tree roots, veered to the right, therefore missing Mother's house, and came to rest beside one of the raised veggie beds. It's a wonder that Mother and Hubbie were not still in the yard when it happened...one of them could have been hit with the wheel!

Mother had heated the remainder of the split pea soup for our supper. After we'd eaten, she went home, and I uploaded snapshots of the maverick truck wheel to my social network page. I'd taken the snapshots just before supper.

Then Hubbie and I watched the 2010, PG-13 movie, "Ghost Writer," starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, and, briefly, Timothy Hutton and Jim Belushi (startlingly bald in this film). A ghostwriter is hired to write the memoirs of a former prime minister, and gets caught up in political and sexual intrigue. Surprise ending.

Funny: at one of the dress shops, I heard a phone ring, so I whipped out my cell phone and answered it just as a young clerk waltzed by, shooting me an amused smile, and answered the store phone.