You know... sometimes there are people in the world you kinda dread talking to. You see them, or, more often, they see you from across the bar and before you know it, there they are, all wanting to talk and stuff. And then sometimes, it's actually not as bad as you thought it would be.
After a loverly dinner at Calaban's in historic downtown Neenah, and then a trip to the mall to totally geek out on work stuff and cooking stuff and whine about being too poor to shop at Pottery Barn, that was my experience tonight. It probably helped that I was able to work in a story from "A Cook's Tour" about food poisoning made worse by Jerry Lewis (i.e. the French are even worse than we thought), but even that aside it was pretty good. Certainly better than can be expected.
Also, at the mall I swooned over several pairs of shoes. Some of them dreamt up by the giant nanobyte god-tree in Schlee's sporting mecca. (Mrs. Jones: powdery blue Doc Martin mary janes... I'm just saying.) I purchased none of them. A great feat. One that will not soon be repeated, I'm sure. I hate to admit it, because it will just get me committed, but there are honestly many mornings when I look in my closet and decide that I have no shoes to go with the outfit I am wearing. Insanity, I know, but it has many roots: 1) there was a time in my life when I owned no shoes. I'm not making this up. The only shoes I had were borrowed from a classmate. sad, sad, sad...why must I be so sad? and 2) when you're a fat short girl, shoes are the only sure bet when you're going shopping. Granted, I now have many shoes, and can buy clothes that fit in most any store I want (formerly not the case), but one doesn't let go of such major hang-ups. So - I expect that for the rest of my life, unless thrust into poverty or some such thing, I will continue to buy shoes that to the sane person it would appear I do not actually need. Thank you for loving me anyway. Or, as many of my coworkers have taken to saying after their crazy rants, "Thanks for listening".