In Which We Accidentally Go to the Mall

Yesterday sucked.

My laptop is dying under my fingertips. The case is cracked (I may have dropped it once. Or twice).

The letters on the keyboard are all pecked off (see!), so unless you’re a touch typist, it’s useless.

And now, about half the time when I open the case, the bottom two-thirds of the screen is a wash of gray static. If you tap the screen, it’ll flick back on, but I can hear the death rattle.

Fortunately, in a moment of weakness and guilt, Mars promised he would replace both my phone and my computer — and get me an iPad too. And some time at a spa. And a writers retreat.

Yes, he felt very guilty. It’s been a rough couple of months.

Yesterday we made the long trek into Edmonton to buy a new laptop and a new iPhone (AT&T refuses to unlock my old one so I can use it in Canada, so that one’s kind of forced on me unless I want to keep paying 69 cents a minute for every phone call I make and a quarter for every text).

I’m not really a mall person, much less a really big mall person, so we drove past the legendary West Edmonton Mall — the biggest in North America — in favor of a smaller one where we could park closer to the door and get less exercise (it’s one of my New Year’s goals — the only one I’ve kept up).

But it turns out our bank won’t let us spend the money sitting in our checking account (more on this in a later post), so we left the little mall with nothing to show for our two or three hours there. So, yeah, things were looking pretty sucky.

We headed home and … fast forward through my meandering explanation of how we were hungry and it would take an hour to drive home and cook dinner, so we decided to eat out, and how the Urban Spoon app failed to warn us that the Old Spaghetti Factory was actually IN West Ed Mall, and how we had a 30-minute wait for a table but Girly Girl had her heart set on spaghetti so we stayed, and how when we finally got a table, she tried to order chicken nuggets but I threw a fit and MADE her order spaghetti … yeah, skip all that.

Anyway, dinner was great, and three Limoncello Lemon Drop Martinis later (they were virgin, Mom! Honest!*), I was feeling much mellower, so we decided to walk around the mall a bit.

And … wait for it …

I LOVED it!

Oh, my goodness, I thought it was just going to be bigger: more noise, more awful blue lighting, more same-old, same-old stores catering to anorexic pre-teens. But this mall was FUN!!

The first thing I saw was a steam punk store, and I wanted terribly to show it to my friend Kim. There were all sorts of fun gadgets and clothing. The thing on the left, for instance, is a felt top hat with copper goggle things.

And there was a hat store!! I nearly bought an adorable off-white ’40s influenced hat that sat (with the help of a headband) on the side of the head. I might go back for it.

There was lots more too. A killer waterpark with a wave pool and umpteen water slides. A sea lion park where you can interact with the animals. A submarine ride. Remote control boats you could drive around the lagoon. And if you get bored, you can always go shopping.

My absolute favorite thing, though, was the replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa María.

It was magical to walk around the deck and think about Columbus and his men, setting sail on this tiny wooden thing into an open ocean that — as far as they knew — never ended. Heck, the boat was built for the calmer waters of the Mediterranean not the open ocean, and Santa Maria was the BIG boat! Now that is true courage.

Anyway, my point is … I’ve been won over. WEM is amazing. Heck, I may well take a mini-vacation there, come January.

All by myself. I deserve it.

*Yeah, right.

Tags: Edmonton, West Edmonton Mall