Mall Shopping

this really isn't about mall shopping -- its about non-mall shopping. u see, we live in nh -- where the malls r few and far between. the nearest mall to us is in concord -- which is about an hour's drive (provided u don't hit any traffic when u get close to concord. the largest mall near us is about 1.5 hours away in manchester. if we drove 2+ hours we could go to the mall in holyoke, ma, but then we'd have to pay sales tax on anything we buy. however, there is no toll booth on the way there and its pretty much a straight shot. the same could also be said for target and craft stores like michaels and acmoore for us. shopping is NOT easy when u live in nh. ppl don't believe me when i tell them how far we r from a mall. but its true ...

so having said all this, yesterday my daughter had no school and we decided around noon that we would go to the mall in manchester. there is an acmoore there and a michaels nearby and lots of stores (like old navy and forever 21) where my daughter likes to clothes shop. we got there close to 2 and went into acmoore, where she got one paint brush and i bought about $7 worth of beading supplies. we then went to the restroom and as we came out of the restroom into the mall near acmoore i heard a boom, the lights flickered and the fire alarms started going off.

this is not a joke folks -- this is my life -- my timing has always sucked, so it was no surprise to me. since there were no announcements that we were to evacuate the building and ppl were pretty much ignoring the alarms, we continued (rather stupidly my daughter thought since at school when the alarm goes off it means "get the heck out of here now"). we got to forever 21 and i asked the sales lady if she knew what was going on and she assured me that this sort of stuff happens all the time and we were in no real danger. my daughter decided to try on a few things and the next thing i know they were telling us we needed to leave, so we started back towards the store we'd come in originally (best buy) only to discover that the security ppl wouldn't let us back that way and we would have to go out another door and walk around the outside of the mall to get to our car. have u ever tried walking around the outside of a mall??

we decided we would drive down the road to the michaels and then come back and see if we could be let into the mall. of course, by the time we'd left there were already 6 firetrucks (and probably half the fire battalion of manchester) in place and two of them with baskets up on the roof. where were all these guys when we were asked to evacuate the building by the personnel at forever 21 -- not once did we see any firemen in the mall or security telling us to leave or even an announcement that we should leave.

at any rate, after we went to michaels we came back to the mall and it still was "closed" and we decided to drive the 40 minutes to concord to the other mall -- which we did -- where we had some dinner and shopped very little and then went to michaels and target nearby. it was just one of those really weird days that u can't predict. and truly it wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't had to drive 1.5 hours to get to the mall in the first place.

so today i turned on the news to discover that an electrical worker triggered an explosion, which lead to a fire, (thus the need for the firemen and firetrucks), and that he was severely injured. i will pray for quick healing for him.