The World According to Gio

I've had a reasonably productive day. Got my hair cut, went to the evil that is known as Arden Fair Mall, spent four hours looking for plain shirts in acceptable colors for work and linen pants--yes, that quest continues in a half-assed way¹--suffered permanent damage to my retinas in several stores, cursed the springline designers colorblindness but failed to have a hissy fit in the middle of Macy's this time, and then thought to myself, "you know, there's an Old Navy not too far away in the ghetto strip mall... they're usually good about having shirts in all sorts of unfashionable colors..." I now have short-sleeved plain crew neck shirts that cover all the ink in a variety of boring business-like colors that will mix and match with my boring business-like trousers. Moral of the story: next time, try Old Navy first.

Then I spent an hour or two in Borders to decompress and buy some books. mintwitch I looked long and hard at "Ilium," but after reading the synopsis on the jacket, I suspect the reason you want me to read it is because you'd like to find out just exactly how much damage I can do to any breakables in my living room with a hardback. So I think I'll wait until it's out in paperback at least. Instead I picked up the latest installment in the Artemis Fowl series, "Fingersmith" by Sarah Waters, "The Abomination" by Paul Golding, and "The Coming Storm" by Paul Russell. Mmmmmmm. Books.

Still feeling a little stressed from the shopping trauma, I then called zortwife to arrange for pizza and movie night. Pizza was yummy. We watched Goldfish Memory, which zortwife picked off the shelf at Blockbuster rather randomly and which turned out to be a really sweet and funny film full of great characters and beautiful shots of Dublin and buddleia I order you to watch this for one particular scene which had me screaming your name because it describes the connections between all the lesbians attending a dinner party. My favorite moment though, I think, was when the guy who'd just been given a black eye by a bouncer was stood in front of his bathroom mirror pressing a packet of fish fingers to his shiner *g*

¹The reason the search is now half-assed is that my mother informed me this morning that she just sent me a package containing several pairs of trousers including at least one pair of linen trousers from H&M. I have high hopes that they are going to be in the right size too, as I finally seem to have cured her of the habit of sending me clothes several sizes too big; either that, or her eyes are much worse than we thought.... whatever the case, the t-shirts that arrived last week were all size 10s and fit more or less perfectly, which is more than I can say for the t-shirts in her previous care package, which I'm mostly using as amusing nightshirts, on account of the scooping necklines dropping below my nipples. Very fashionable that.