Eastern Standard Blog

Well, well, well. Iowa did not disappoint. We went over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The drive was better than expected. Takes about 6 hours and the 3 year old behaved about as well as you can expect. It was just totally bizzaro for me though. I haven’t lived outside of Iowa for the last 12 years. Wow, that was even a little depressing to write. I don’t really connect with my family (immediate or extended) so that makes everything extra awkward.  So, we actually spent a lot of time in shopping malls even though we weren’t really shopping. It was cold and snowy, so the options seemed pretty limited. Saturday turned out to be a wonderful day for people watching at the mall. We got to witness a teenage girl walking through the mall, in all seriousness, with spurs on her boots! She wasn’t wearing them because she was from the ranch, she was wearing them to be cool. And boy, let me tell you, she was pretty cool. Then, we ran into one of the most socially awkward encounters I’ve ever been lucky enough to personally encounter. We were heading to the family bathroom so we could all go pee-pee, and who should come walking out of the closed off portion of the family bathroom? Two male mall security guards. They look at each other with shock and embarrassment then at us and one of them says ‘I was showing him some stuff for training.’ Wow. Wow. Wow. They scampered off quickly.