After yesterday’s ride, I would have loved to spend today lounging around in bed with nothing at all to do. But today was the last time the choir sings before we go into summer schedule at church, and today the recorder group (now tentatively dubbed Driftwood) was to perform, and so there was nothing to do but lay in bed as long as the cats would let us and then get up and go to church.

Surprisingly I am nowhere near as sore as I expected. Compared to long rides last year, this time I can still zip up and down the stairs with almost no twinges in my muscles. It’s actually a nice feeling to know I can pound out 32 miles and still be (mostly) functional.

The rest of the day has been nice, if not necessarily the ‘lounge around with nothing planned’ sort of day I’d envisioned. After lunch Richard and I headed off to the mall to go a bit of shopping. He needed jeans and I – well, lets just say that I have come to the realization that even the best of underwear has a shelf life, and after the underwire suddenly attacked me in a second bra, I knew that time had been reached.

Years ago my friend and I descended on Victoria’s Secret and spent several hundred dollars on underwear. I know this might seem a bit insane to a lot of people, but there really is a difference between good quality and the cheap things you can get at the bargain stores. I may have resigned myself to the fact that it is next to impossible to find a bra *without* an underwire, but I refuse to have to wear ugly underwear. So when I emerged from that shopping trip, it was with a bag crammed with silky bras and panties, in matching colors, and it was a marvelously girly sort of thing to do.

Today I descended on Victoria’s Secret again, but this time it was with my husband instead of a female friend. And I got to giggle madly about the act of men in lingerie stores.

Men in lingerie stores, for the most part, all seem to have the same hunted look on their faces. You can see it in their eyes – they know they cannot stare at the lingerie, and they certainly cannot stare at other women who might be shopping, and so they tend to hover anxiously near their wives or girlfriends, eyes darting from here to there, trying desperately to unfocus their gaze so as not to appear as if they are noticing anything in the store at all. From the point of view of a woman, I can find this all grandly amusing. I do realize that perhaps it isn’t quite so amusing from the point of view of the man.

We did a little bit more shopping after that, and then we called a friend and met her at Mimi’s Café because when there is a Mimi’s near where I am, I have no choice but to succumb to the lure of their buttermilk spice muffins. During dinner we did a lot of talking and laughing and ate crème brule cheesecake for dessert and actually managed to have conversations about things other than Benthic Creatures or the Company to be Nicknamed Later (even though those topics did occasionally creep in). After dinner we had to take advantage of the fact that we were within walking distance of a Barnes and Nobles, which aside from being chock full of books, also has a coffee shop on site. So we wandered around the books and managed to escape that side of the store with only a few purchases each. I talked our friend into buying Good Omens because every time I read it, it always makes me laugh out loud, and she talked me into getting Outlander because isn’t some cheesy romance, and Richard got something by Bill Bryson because he really likes Bill Bryson, and then we dragged each other kicking and screaming away from the books before we spent all our money, and instead got coffee and chai tea lattes and mochas and sat around a tiny little table and talked and laughed for another hour or two until there was yawning and realization that the evening eventually had to end.