Rainy Saturday

It’s some godawful weather here in the northeast. We’re expecting a pair of Amy’s friends this afternoon for an early dinner. She’s been cooking and cleaning all day while I’ve been cleaning and trying to stay out of her way. It seems to have worked out okay, provided her friends are on the right bus out here from NYC.

We spent yesterday at this giant-ass outlet mall in New York state. I’ve written about this place a few times before, including one of the first posts I ever wrote. No Hugo Boss clothing this time around, but I found a couple of pairs of decent pants for the fall/winter.

Our routine for visiting this mall is that we

a) go on Saturday

b) leave a half-hour before the place opens

The latter enables us to get together before buses from NYC start showing up and the parking lot becomes jammed with rental cars carrying The Axis: German and Japanese tourists who have come to buy luxury goods on the cheap.

We got a late start yesterday, since Amy had to handle a work-emergency in the morning. When we reached the place, it was around noon, and it was a Friday.

That’s when Amy discovered the importance of going only on Saturdays: Hasidic Jews won’t be there.

As it is, there were enough Hasidim present yesterday to populate Samaria. The place was overrun with head-covered moms pushing multiple baby carriages, two or three more children in tow, while sections of the parking lot looked like a reunion for Country Squire station wagons.

This led Amy to ask, “What exactly are they all here to buy?”

I replied that we should open a headscarf and wig store up there: “And the best thing is, we could take Saturdays off!”

Anyway, we spent a bunch of hours up there, with Amy searching pretty much in vain for fall clothes. On the plus side, we swung by my office on the way home and picked up my new Amazon delivery: a couple of 1gb SD cards for our digital cameras, a gravy separator, and a pair of books, My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler (whose show on E! is a hoot), and Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic comic book about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (of Neverland) meeting in a hotel in Austria shortly before WWI.

I read the first few installments of the comic years ago, and, um, enjoyed it a lot. I’ll let you know how the collected edition (three books in a slipcase) works out.

Once we finally got home, we busted out the gin and our most recent Netflix choice: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched in a while. Robert Downey, Jr. is typically fantastic, but Val Kilmer’s also pretty fun to watch as Gay Perry, the private eye. Run, don’t walk.

Anyway, our guests swear they’re on the right bus, and oughtta be here in half an hour. Amy’s made a cassoulet; I’ll let you know how it goes (she also picked up some neat cheeses for hors d’oeuvres, and made a chocolate cake for dessert). If it weren’t typhooning out, we’d take her friends on a nice tour of the gardens out here.

That’s the skinny. I hope everyone else is having a drier holiday weekend.