A post in which I am lazy*

I ran all week last week. I only had one night at home. Most unusually for a Saturday in December, there was no event at which I was supposed to appear tonight. Plus the weather was supposed to be ugly. So I had just kind of planned to take the day off. I did nothing today. Unfortunately, I had automatically set the alarm last night, so it went off at 6am. That was a bit of a jolt, but I was able to go back to sleep with no trouble.

I eventually got up and wandered around the house in my jammies for a while. I made some breakfast. I also made a cuppa Indian Friendship Tea that Robert left at the house last Christmas. I had a message from him this morning, and I should have called him back, but basically I was just too sorry and lazy to get into a big phone conversation. I was pretty determined to do nothing. The only thing on the agenda today was to go to Hamerick’s and get Grandma Shumate’s Christmas present. She wanted some new clothes this year. Although I had planned on going this morning, I didn’t. I didn’t even go to the flea market today. I messed around on the computer, read, fell into the Manhunt vortex, and got stood up before I was able to muster the gumption to get up and get cleaned up to go out.

Promising myself lunch out, I finally left the house around 1:45. I went by to see a buddy, and then headed for Hamerick’s – all the way across town. By this point it was about 4, and I was afraid they closed at 5. I wanted to get over there and get her stuff this weekend before it was picked over too badly. Well too late. There was a bewildering plethora of XL petite clothes. Either there are a helluva lot of short wide little old ladies running around, or the buyers at Hamerick’s are under the impression that there is about to be a surge. Grandma wears a petite medium. Yeah that’s about as common as hen’s teeth to start with. When you then take into account the complexities of taste, color, softness, collar style, ease of fastening and un-fastening, having a neck opening large enough not to mess up her hair, etc, it becomes damn near impossible. (It was still better than the year she sent me to buy her panties though. I am seldom self-conscious in public, but I felt like a real perv that year.)

I was there long enough for the sale-lady to pointedly ask if she could help me. I’m hoping she realized that I was merely a lost Christmas-shopping male, and not a wanna-be midget cross-dresser. Eventually, I settled on a button-up top in pale lavender with little violets embroidered up the sides of the placket. The collar was low, and had an extra collar of pale green (the color of the violet leaves) inset inside for a little visual interest. There were pants, miraculously in her size, in a shade of purple about the color of the violets embroidered on the top. I would rather have had matching pants, but this was just going to have to do. The top looked like her, and the other things I found in her size emphatically did not.

After a quick call to Eve for reassurance about my choice, I made my way to the register. Amazingly after the day I’m sure she’d had, the sales lady was actually very nice to me. She teased me a little. “Now did you try this on?” she asked. I explained that I was buying a Christmas present for my grandmother. “Well,” she said. “I didn’t think you would take a petite.” I wonder now if she was flirting with me. I didn’t think to check for a ring, as I usually do with guys. But I digress.

I still hadn’t had any lunch, and I was at the “feed me dammit” stage. I stopped off at Little Caesar’s and got a cheese pizza, because I didn’t have a book to read. I hate going out to eat by myself without a book. So I took the pizza home, stuffed myself with it, and then followed it up with the left-over Christmas cookies that James sent home with me from their party last week. I finished The Lunatic Café before bed. It was lovely.