much to my shock and amazement, as well as to the complete contradiction of what i said a few entries ago, this past weekend rivaled the previous weekend in the weekend fun quotient™. this is mostly due to the entertainment i got out of saturday, as friday night consisted of working late, coming home and crashing, and sunday was more or less spent doing laundry, cleaning and running mom to the mall on an errand.

and let me just say right now that i will make it a life goal to never go to the mall on a sunday afternoon again. parking was chaos. i had to cram my little car into this one space between two double-parked SUVs. if only i drove a vespa, i would've been less jittery about getting in and out. unfortunately for that reason (and many others) i do not drive a vespa.

so, like, saturday. yeah. steph was off, and i hadn't seen her in what seemed like a few years (note: two weeks is a few years in the me/steph time continuum). we decided to venture out and about. but instead of perusing one of our usual haunts (annapolis, columbia or [god help us] glen burnie) or one of our less-than-usual-but-still-routine haunts (baltimore, white marsh or severna park), we decided to hop in the car and drive to reston for the day. so we did.

predictably, the trip down to virginia was a trip. "bump, bump, bump" came on the radio, so we began enchanting our fellow 495-travelers with our own bump, bump, bumps. OK. maybe you had to be there for that one.

no props to the reston snow emergency team. the sidewalks were horrible. like, horrible. i was scared to walk on them. you'd think that, two weeks after the blizzard that caused all the winter ick, the clean-up teams would've cleaned up such a densely-populated retail area. but no. steph and i looked like proper asses flailing our arms about as we attempted to step over and/or slide down pathways consisting of icy chunks and slick spots. but we didn't fall once. ha!

we hit best buy. (the cast of queer as folk was going to be there for an autograph-signing the next day, which i found peculiar, given that i have recently become addicted to the show.) we bought CDs and DVDs. we hit barnes & noble. i found the bret easton ellis book i was looking for, but they were all sold out of nick mcdonell's twelve. we went next door to starbucks for hot chocolate (it was damn cold out, avril) and asked the staff if they knew of any other book vendors in the area. they directed us to another shopping plaza, but, due to the commotion in starbucks at the time, all i heard was: "blah blah blah left blah blah blah turn blah blah blah there." so we just drove around the area for shits and giggles, making up our own directions and only getting sorta lost once.

we encountered several more shopping centers. indeed, i found twelve at another book store up the road. but the real find was this big-ass grocery store called harris teeter. man oh man. we musta spent a couple hours in there perusing the wine section alone. (as marylanders, we're not used to finding alcohol in supermarkets.) after some deliberation, we both decided to buy saki since we'd never had it before. plus the bottles it came in were too cool-looking to pass up.

we had a late dinner at ruby tuesday. (chicken fingers and honey mustard, of course.) but it was kind of a downer, as some people who were seated near us openly complained about the pokey service and turned it into a race issue. blah. so we were kinda glad to get that out of the way. we returned to harris teeter to say a tearful goodbye (and buy fresh sushi!), then stopped at target, where we waited for about 10 minutes as the incompetent clerk struggled with ringing up the hand lotion steph was trying to buy. steph, a target vet herself, provided some useful hints to the clerk as to how to scan the item correctly, all of which were ignored. (dumb bitch. the clerk, not steph.)

so when we got in the car and found our way back to the beltway, we were kind of irritated and exhausted and happy to be leaving. but it was still fun, and the good really outweighed the bad. see?

bad: nearly falling down on unshoveled sidewalks, a semi-unpleasant dining experience (though the food was fine), waiting for hand lotion for 10 minutes at target because of the clerk's stupidity and unwillingness to listen to steph. argh.

good: everything else. especially harris teeter. he's my new best friend. (haha. it's funny because "he" is a store! where do i come up with this stuff?) oh. and i finally bought a set of weights. and i didn't make too much of an ass of myself getting them in and out of the buggy in the checkout lane.

speaking of new best friends, that night was interesting. very interesting. let's just say that 1) saki isn't very good until halfway through the first bottle, and then it becomes pretty damn tasty, and 2) i wonder how much a four-hour phone call made from maryland to new york at 3 o'clock in the morning is going to cost. anybody know?

postscript: this is the first entry i've written while listening to blur. it's about time.