right now i feel too old and tired to be someone's daughter

so, mom gets on a plane in el paso on tuesday evening. at her layover in houston, she calls me from her cell phone.

she's had a horrible flight. bad pressurization has caused a pain that feels like 10 inch spikes being driven into her sinuses. plus, she lost her glasses. she can only see if she wears her prescription sunglasses.

we scheme about how to quickly get her some replacement glasses when she lands in raleigh, and speculate about the location of the lost pair. she calls back a few minutes later. "you'll never guess who i ran into --LITERALLY RAN INTO-- while i was buying some motrin at a newsstand! frank bielec from trading spaces!!" she said she made her purchase and turned from the counter and ran smack into him. he was nice, she said, and clearly didn't want any attention drawn to him. mom told him, "i won't tell anyone it's you."

she also said that after that encounter she went to the bathroom but accidentally walked into the men's room. quick on her feet, she pointed to her sunglasses and said to the guy at the sink who was staring at her, "it's a good thing i'm blind!"

she arrives. we search her luggage for a last gasp hope that her glasses are stowed inside. no luck. almost as a lark, ray suggests she try one of his old pairs of glasses as a temporary fix. they work ok (better than nothing) but aren't quite her style.

first thing this morning i printed her a map to the lenscrafters at southpoint mall. i couldn't go with her; i had a doctor's appointment in chapel hill. i left mom and went merrily on my way in spacepod (leaving my CRX --which was actually once mom's car-- with her to drive). i parked in the hospital's garage, walked to the clinic, and on my way up the escalator started looking in my purse for my clinic account card... and couldn't find my wallet.

ack! this NEVER happens to me. NEVER.

i'm panicked. the receptionist is able to check me in, but with no wallet i can't pay my co-pay. this isn't really an immediate problem, so i move on to worrying about something else: how i'm going to get out of the parking garage? when the nurse takes my blood pressure it's a little higher than usual. not surprising, since i'm pretty much freaking out. must. find. wallet.

pap smear. 'nuff said. day's off to a lovely start.

traipse back to the parking garage. happen to pull up to the one cashier booth which contains a cute young man, tell him my tale of woe (no wallet! this NEVER happens to me!) and he's sympathetic. "do you have any spare change in your car?" it's not my car. i don't know. i start searching around. lisa, you cleaned him up too well... there's no spare change in that car at all. he looks at me and says, "well, it's only a dollar" and he raises the gate. i'm home free.

i call mom. she hasn't left for lenscrafters yet! but the fact that she's home means she can look for my wallet. she finds it, in the CRX. i haven't lost it. it just fell out of my purse. whew frickin' hoo.

this is turning into a long story, and by this time it's still only 10:30am.

we go to the mall together in the CRX. mom decides to have an eye exam. i go into the exam room with her. (watching this is surprisingly fun. when she's reading off the rows of letters, i giggle and smile when she gets them wrong. i think to myself, "THAT'S NOT A "Z"! IT'S AN "E"!") we take her updated prescription and start looking at frames.

this, by the way, is one of my favorite activities of all time. trying on glasses. in fact, i had a hard time focusing my attention on mom. i wanted to keep trying things on myself. we found a few cute things for her, but decided to walk over to specs to see what they had, too. specs had some good things, but in the end we went for a stylin' pair of PINK VERSACE glasses with SQUARE LENSES and NO BOTTOM RIM. woot! way to go mom!

we grab a quick salad at california pizza kitchen while we wait for the glasses to be made. mom's dieting. i find she's inadvertantly inspiring me to get back on the diet wagon, too. (i mean, not only did we both get salads, but we got SMALL salads. and SENT BACK THE BREAD they plunked on our table.)

so, we walk back to lenscrafters to retrieve the glasses. they're not quite ready yet. we walk some more, making a loop around the inside of the mall. i stop in origins to buy some makeup. we walk back to lenscrafters.

after her glasses are fitted, we decide to either 1) get a pedicure while we're at the mall or 2) see "the da vinci code" while we're at the mall. the movie wins (much to my toenails' chagrin). i'm the only person in the country who HASN'T read this book, so the movie makes my brain hurt a little. there are lots of loony conspiracies set forth, with too many secret societies for me to keep up with. i get the general gist of the film (i know who the good guys are), and surprisingly i see the ending coming from a mile away. am i that smart? i must be, 'cause i don't know nothin' about jesus.

anyway, we're starving when the movie is over (it's 7:15pm by now) so we rush home and whip up a couple of dieter's dinners. ray comes home from work around 8. i finish up the mix CD i've been working on, mom calls new mexico, and by 9:30 we're all yawning and want to go to bed.

i hope that the rest of mom's visit isn't quite as eventful as today was.

Posted by xta at May 24, 2006 10:26 PM | TrackBack