Friday adventures

I am pleased to report that Annabelle finally seems to be on the road to recovery. She lasted less than an hour at school yesterday before coming home and sleeping most of the day away. She was feeling OK when we set out for the airport at 5:30 this morning, and I hope it holds so that she and Fred can have a fun visit.

I had a hair appointment in Louisville at 11:45, so there wasn't much point in coming home. I went to the mall and sat in the parking lot waiting for Macy's to open. While I was waiting, Annabelle phoned in to let me know that she had made it safely to Chicago.

Once the mall opened, I helped her kill time by texting back and forth. I'm having fun with Picture Mail, so I sent her a shot of a display of Derby hats:



(I don't especially want to go to Derby, but I sure wish I had a reason to go hat shopping.)

I didn't find anything at the mall for myself (what's with all the stupid summery clothes?! I'm freezing still!), but I made an absolute score for Annabelle. I found a Tommy Hilfiger hoody that feels like it is lined with teddy-bear fur, originally priced at $100 (who pays that for a hoody?!) and marked down to $50 (still absurd) but brought down through a combination of promotions to under $30 (score!). I ran to the ladies' room and laid it out on a table in the lounge and took a picture of it to send to her:



There was a woman in the lounge nursing a tiny baby while her mom and preschool-aged son loitered nearby. It reminded me of the time when Annabelle was a newborn, and I was nursing her in the ladies' room at Nordstrom (best place for breastfeeding in Tyson's Corner Mall), and I ran into an old friend of mine from Stetson. I didn't want to go all "Sunrise, Sunset" on this poor stranger, but it hit me that that day at Nordstrom feels like yesterday, yet here I was swapping text messages with that "baby" while she waited for her connecting flight at O'Hare. Wah!

OK, enough sentimentality! After the mall, I stopped by Qdoba for a quick lunch of steak nachos and then headed off to my hair appointment. I love going to get my hair done, because my stylist and I just talk about all sorts of stuff. Today, however, we got so busy chatting that we forgot that (duh!) I've been using Retin A to try to fight off wrinkles. Turns out Retin A is the natural enemy of the eyebrow waxing, and I lost a strip of skin just above each eye:



Ouch!