You Learn Something Every &^%$# Day

Today's lesson: if you exit BlogWriter, it does *not* automatically save your post, as does WriteRoom. So the blog post I'd been writing for you for the last half hour is gone. Vanished. Poof! Because I had to take a photo, and so I had to use the camera, and so. . . .

This irritates me mightily, as I had been entertaining us with tales of shopping in Dallas, which is what we did yesterday. I also told you about how I didn't have to shoot the woman who puked next to me in the parking lot this morning because 1) she didn't puke *right* next to me and 2) I don't actually carry my gun with me. I did think about it, however. And then I might have ranted a bit about Other People. As in, "Gah." And, perhaps, "Gack." It's the major drawback of travel, for me: the exposure to other people and their noise and filth and nasty habits and bad attitudes and effluvia. You never see cats digging in their noses and then wiping their fingers on their shorts, is all I can say.

Yeah, yeah, so they don't have fingers. But still--they never do that.

And I told you about this leather bag I found and studied because it was Almost Cool, meaning it came so close to total coolness but just missed, which is really inspiring to me because, as I'm standing there fondling it, I'm thinking of how I can make one and fix all the things--the color and texture and size and embellishment and, well, pretty much everything--that keep it from cool-dom. I told The EGE that that alone, seeing that bag, was worth the whole trip. You can literally feel the sparks in your brain when that happens--it's like some drug that makes things zip around, makes the connections ping. I can't wait to get home and start experimenting. I want to make more things out of leather (yes, leather is My Dark Side--the dead animal skin that I adore and that makes me feel guilty for adoring, but there you go) but am unsure of the processes--of cutting it and sewing it, of what will stretch and how much, of what needs to be reinforced and what's fine on its own. I have unlined leather totes that are fine, even though they're thin and carry a lot. Why? Why does other, thicker leather stretch out of shape? I have research to do.

And then I shopped. Rather a lot. Way more than I usually do. There's this new store, Desigual, in the Northpark Mall, and I tweeted it yesterday--it has the most Almost Cool stuff of any store I've been in in a long time. I've been to their website (sorry, no links in this app) because I'd seen a few of the pieces in The Boutique, the ritzy little Midland shop that carries Free People and Double D Ranch and Old Gringo boots--that kind of stuff--but I hadn't been into a Desigual store, with the patched and appliquéd stuff, the screen-printed and stitched and embellished stuff. What kept it from being Totally Cool is that it's all machine-done, as far as I can tell. Lots of zig-zag and serging, both of which I think are ugly. But the ideas! The ideas! And then two pair of pants I couldn't resist. I tried, O! I tried. I walked away. But then I came back. Of course. And bought them.

Funny thing--this is how our life is: I'm in the dressing room, standing in front of the mirror checking out one of the pair of pants. A woman next to me in the huge mirror calls out to her friend in the dressing room to come see these pants I've got. The curtain parts, and someone says, "Ricë! What are you doing here?" It took me a second to recognize Lisa Renner, which is silly because we just saw her in Phoenix at Art Unraveled, but you don't expect to run into people you know in a dressing room when you're traveling, you know?

OK--I'm going to post this now. It's got me spooked, afraid it's going to eat another post.

Then I'd have to shoot it.