Visited the mall the other day to get some fresh new tires on my baby.  I had called Firestone the week before to see if I could bring my car by.  "Sure come on over right now," they said enthusiastically.  "Well, do you have any 205/50R17 tires?"  I had to ask because my car takes a weird sized tire. "WHAT size was that?"  So in the end I had to wait a week for the tires to be shipped from Pennsylvania.  When I got there I also asked to have the oil changed and the alignment checked.  Which left me with two hours to kill at the mall...

So after snapping a few pictures of Vanessa being worked on, I hoofed it over to the main portion of the mall to kill some time.  I had to walk through some drive-throughs, and I discovered that some folks whip through there at a pretty good clip in their vehicles.  Between the satellite stores and the mall is generally a no-man's land--a place that folks drive through but rarely walk through.  It is often strewn with trash and oddball items, so there was plenty to ponder on my trip to the mall.  Walking past Pizza Hut the first thing I saw was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.  Clearly college kids or some sort park there at the periphery of the lot to party.  The next item I saw was a used condom, which confirmed my last theory.  And then a few paces more yielded the strangest item of all, a used pregnancy test, registering negative.  It struck me as a little bit funny how all things sort of fit together--get drunk, make whoopee, and then take a pregnancy test, although the idea of some scared young woman checking herself for pregnancy in a pizza hut bathroom made me sad.

Eventually I arrived at the mall.  I really only had one destination in mind (MasterCuts -- my mop needed trimming), but as I was walking past FYE I noticed the new Harry Potter DVD was on sale.  So I placed a call to my wife and checked if she needed me to pick it up.  That was met with a resounding YES!  So I planned to stop back there after getting my hair neatened up.  But it turned out the wait at MasterCuts was over a half hour, so I went back to FYE and picked up three DVD's.  In addition to Harry Potter, I picked up Jarhead and Ab-Normal Beauty.  I watched these today.  I was less than impressed with Jarhead, but I suppose it was decent enough.  Ab-Normal Beauty was gawd awful... there's an hour and thirty seven minutes of my life utterly wasted--extra disappointing in this case since it was made by the same people who brought us The Eye, perhaps one of the scariest movies I've seen.  I haven't watched the new Potter movie yet.  My family and I will probably watch this together.

After FYE I stopped in at McDonald's for a quick lunch.  While I was there I saw a pregnant woman ordering her lunch.  I hemmed and hawed before actually eating there, but I can't imagine deciding to eat that crud while pregnant.  But who knows?  Convenience is probably a lot more important when you're uncomfortable and lugging around a baby in your lower abdomen. I silently hoped that she didn't eat that stuff every day.

Then I poked my head into the GameStop to check supplies of the XBOX 360.  Unsurprisingly it is still sold out and they are still filling preorders!  Heck with it.  I can wait until there are 360's actually sitting unclaimed on store shelves.  Who knows, maybe by then they'll have worked out some of the bugs.

It was nice to get my hair cut.  It was wayyyyy too long.  Feels much better having it thinned out, trimmed, and neatened up.  Afterward I stopped into Waldenbooks and was immediately accosted about the Preferred Reader program... except that they don't offer that program anymore.  They new program is actually free, so I agreed to take the pamphlet and look it over later.  (I still have not done so... not sure if the new program is better.)

Then it was back to get my car and off home.  Not a terrible afternoon and I even got a good mile or so of walking in (which of course I utterly defeated the benefits of by eating two McDonald's cheeseburgers.)  Ah well.