Rainy Days and Sundays

After last Friday's Whine and Cheese Party, things have looked up considerably. The temperature has risen to well above zero, and the snow and ice are melting all over the place. Literally. Even though it is a pissy, dreary day with the rain pelting down, I am a happy woman. A break in the weather, even this kind of break, is a relief. It must be the Irish DNA.

Thing 2 wanted to go to the mall with a friend this afternoon, and, mostly to get out of the house, the Mister and I went too. She and the friend wandered off on their own, and we headed for the food court. I badly needed a coffee, and because Himself has a metabolism that goes at a hundred miles an hour, he needed a snack despite having eaten lunch an hour beforehand. (Jealousy is an emotion that I don't often experience, simply because not too many people have anything I want, but having a constitution that allows you to eat anything you want without gaining weight? I would happily sacrifice a limb for that.)

While at the foodcourt, we had ample opportunity to people-watch, which is always fun. Doing it with the Mister has the added bonus of reminding me that he is not actually that much better a person than me after all. (I'm so used to the snarky, sneering voices in my own head that it is refreshing to hear a similar litany from someone else's.) We watched an older gentleman carefully and deliberatly coat his knuckles with Chap-stick. We were enthralled.
We speculated on another man's obvious wig: who did he think he was fooling with it? Instead of making us think "why, that's a fine speciman of a man!" it made us think "he must really hate being bald." And then we wondered if he knew it was made for a woman and hoped he got a phenomenal deal on it.
We pondered the notion of when it became acceptable to go out the door in one's pajamas. There were hoards of roaming teenagers at the mall, and most of them clearly didn't bother getting dressed before leaving the house. We were puzzled....does it take such an enormous amount of time and energy to put on a pair or honest-to-God pants? The Mister and I openly declared our age by questioning this practice. ("Kids these days!")
Himself mused aloud as to why some people, who clearly did put a lot of time and effort into their appearance, still managed to look like they had just come from Clown School. Where they were failing.
When we saw an old guy walk by with a Michael Shumacher jacket on, Himself mentioned that if that was the real Michael Shumacher, then retirement has not been kind. (Personally, I've never understood wearing an article of clothing with a famous person's name on it. You know you're not actually Wayne Gretzky or Tiger Woods, right? And they? have never heard of you.)
Then Himself kicked around the notion that, if one's children were not attractive people, did their parents still think they were attractive? I thought that, yes, most mothers would think that their children were beautiful, all evidence to the contrary being moot. We wandered down this particular philisophical path for some time, using our fellow foodcourt patrons as evidence ("See that woman, does she know her daughter is less than attractive and love her anyway, or does she think she's actually attractive?"), coming to no real conclusion other than the fact that the phrase "a face only a mother could love" did, indeed, have some merit.

In this fashion, we wiled away a soggy afternoon. Nothing too exciting, but an afternoon in the Mister's company is always welcome. Combined with the constant drip off the eaves outside, and my mood is considerably brighter.