A Day At The Mall

As previously arranged, Southern Man picked up his teen-aged daughter this morning to take her shopping for a watch (part of his Christmas to her). However, what she really wants is a Nintendo DS Lite, which (much to her annoyance) has been sold out everywhere since roughly Thanksgiving. Indeed, the previous evening the two of us had spent a fair amount of time on the phone and the web searching for one. Anyway, we ended up at one of the big malls on the north side of the city and spent an enjoyable morning of shopping and drinking at Starbucks and such. She never did find a watch she liked but Southern Man bought her a bunch of other stuff instead, so she left relativly happy.

Then it was his baby girl's turn to shop. She had a shiny new C-note from her grandmother and was eager to put it to good use. The two of us headed back to the same mall and had just a terrific time shopping and playing in the kid's play area. She also ended up with a bunch of stuff and we also saw the new live-action Charlotte's Web in the mall cinema (Southern Man's review here). At last, I got to take her to a new movie before her mom (or my mom) beat me to it!

After several hours of malling her Christmas cash was finally depleted so we dropped by casa gf for a bite to eat. Then gf expressed a desire to see a movie as well so we dropped daughter back off at her mom's house and Southern Man steered for the mall for the third time that day. We ended up at Dreamgirls, which was OK (the singing was occasionally terrific, even if the songs couldn't hold a candle to the R&B that inspired them) but tries too hard to be both a musical and a movie and doesn't do all that well in either genre. And that's pretty much the only review that Southern Man is giving that one. His gf likes that kind of movie (and Southern Man often obliges her and tags along), but his taste tends more towards sci-fi or action-adventure (both serious and mindless) for his movie entertainment. Like the upcoming live-action Transformers movie...which surely won't be much worse than the animated original...

So Southern Man spent pretty much the entire day at the mall. That's a lot of fun, once a year or so, and he's looking forward to doing it again in, say, late December 2007.