Because I have had the week off and my mom also had some time off, we decided to go off shopping together. My mom came and picked me up, since I am still not completely 100% with the back and driving, which requires occasionally being able to twist the back, is out of the question - and we headed off to the mail because we'd heard stories of grand sales at a few stores.

We had lunch first, at Mimi's Cafe because their buttermilk spice muffins are amazing. Apparently my mom and my sisters went there yesterday for lunch and my little sister, who has recently finished school to become a pastry chef, spent a bit of time crumbling her muffin into tiny pieces in an attempt to figure out what all was inside. I have high hopes that she is able to reconstruct the muffin recipe, although I suspect that it might not be a good thing in the long run because they probably are far higher in all the bad things (fat, calories, sugar, you name it) than any of us want to know.

Next we hit the mall - or at least a small portion of it. I'm still a bit slow with walking, so mostly we stuck to two stores. The first was Lane Bryant, because they claimed to have huge sales, and even though their smallest size is often a bit too large for me, we thought it might be worth the trip. The tales of grand sales were grander than the sales themselves, despite the presence of deceptive signs in the front promising huge savings. Okay, I should give them credit - there were huge savings to be had if you did not mind an original price that was perhaps twice as much as it would have been in another store, for things that fell mostly into the categories of cheap, tawdry, or both. It's a bit of a disappointment because both of us remember when Lane Bryant used to carry nice things that were made with decent quality and were appropriate for professional women to wear. But I suspect we are clinging to a memory that has not existed for quite some time, and perhaps there is no need to enter that particular establishment ever again. So instead, we headed off somewhere else, and managed to find a few things there that were meant for actual adults to wear, and for significantly better prices - even without the sales - than we would have paid for something that we wouldn't have been caught dead wearing anyway.

After the shopping my mom brought me back home because my back was twinging a bit. Richard has been home all day, happily doing something with various Linux operating systems, or something, because for some reason that makes no sense to me (much like my obsession with yarn makes no sense to him, I suspect) he finds great joy in wrestling with kernals and operating systems and seeing how close he can come to getting his computers to crash. He has also been staying close to his nebulizer because even though it looked earlier as if he'd managed to avoid falling under the influence of this latest winter cold from hell that has been making the rounds, our optimism appears to be premature. We'd originally planned to go to The Firehouse tomorrow night for their New Year's Eve dinner, because there are fireworks in Old Sacramento and we've done this before and it's always marvelous food and a lot of fun. But with both of us either getting over the death virus, or coming down with it, we realized it was likely better to just stay home and celebrate in a more subdued manner, with Kleenex and cough suppressants and large quantities of ibuprofen and the rest.

There were reports that a few more rounds of winter storm were coming our way and that seems to be the case, since the rains started a few hours ago and it's pretty much now pouring out there. Neither of us is up to going to the store or out to dinner, so we ordered pizza and gave the delivery guy a large tip for making him brave the storm to bring us food.

Happy Holidailies