Almost Shopped Out

The weekend went great. Maxx, her daughter and I spent Saturday schlepping around the mall buying new school clothes for her daughter and three new tops for me. Then we mowed down a big meal at Boston Pizza (spicy thai chicken...yummmmm). By the time we rolled home I was getting pretty sleepy, but we still stayed up until 2:00 AM flipping through our school yearbook from our senior year and laughing at all the nicknames we suddenly remembered and events and circumstances that made up our high school years. It was pretty funny and almost made up for not having our 20 year reunion this past summer.

I had really been hoping someone would organize it. Maxx, myself and a few others had organized our 10 year reunion and it went off great. We toyed with the idea of also doing the 20 year reunion if no one else jumped up and got the ball rolling, but this summer was so busy for both of us we just didn't have the time to plan something like that. Unfortunately, no one else did either apparently.

I rarely see people I went to high school with anymore. I live 90 minutes away from where I grew up. A lot of my senior class remains in my hometown, some are living in the same area I am, although we rarely if ever run into each other. I wish we saw each other more. Even now, twenty years later, I find it strange to be so out of touch with what everyone's doing. You spend most of your formative years growing up with these people and then turn around one day and they're just gone, never to be seen again. The reunions are my one chance to play catch up, but we've only had one of those and the last one was 10 years ago. It's unfortunate. It's fun to see where people went, who they became. Anyway, the yearbook perusal was a fun look back at all our antics and hi-jinks.

Sunday we went to Cora's for breakfast and ate enough to sustain us for the rest of the day. Then of course we toddled off to Chapters (aka, The Mothership) and spent some time there. I found out Friday I'm receiving a $100 gift certificate from Chapters for the work I've done on the Intranet at work, so I kept my purchases to a minimum, figuring I'd wait until I had that. Still, I bought two books - The World Below, by Sue Miller; and A Great & Terrible Beauty, by Lydia Barr I think the author was.

By 4 PM Maxx and child headed back home. Unfortunately, 5 minutes after she left I went upstairs and found the bag of all their new purchases sitting at the top of my steps. So I'll be mailing that down to them today.

To top it all off, I still have a little money left over to use when Maxx comes back up in September for the Pearl Jam concert. All in all, it was a very fun and productive weekend.

This morning, I finished off the formatted outline for my revisions on The Outlaw Bride. I'm ahead of schedule and ready to start the story evolution worksheet. There are plenty of areas where I can cut, a couple of large chunks that can come out completely - I seemed to be taking the long way around to get somewhere. So I'm not too worried about getting my page count down now that I've done this exercise. Once again, FD30 makes my life, and my revisions, easier.