Start the day with a trip to the airport (4) and breakfast! While waiting in the car lot, I watched a twenty-something guy walk from the terminal down the next row from me, looking, what it seemed to me, for a meter with some money in it. He moved his van to a spot directly in front of me, but my first guess was wrong. With my window down, here's the basic story that I got: Dude claims his van was sideswiped in the parking lot of the airport by a Suburban. His van had a huge gash on the passenger side door but I didn't see any actual collision. Somehow, he was convinced that the Suburban parked directly in front of me was the culprit (I couldn't see any reason that he might think so, but it had just pulled up a few minutes ago.) Airport security came over to take his statement, but the guy didn't have a driver's license on him and made (what appeared to me to be) a cursory "pretend" attempt to find it as though it had fallen out of his gym bag.

Then we left, drama unresolved. Still, there was something fishy about the whole story, least of all why the guy would re-park the van away from the scene of the incident. And if the incident had happened while he was driving, surely the other driver knew that a collision had occurred.

Breakfast was decided on the bagel cafe with some girlfriends of my sister. The place has never failed to serve a hearty meal (I used to live across the street) but it's always hit or miss whether your waitress will give you the time of day. The highlight was a "slice" of blueberry poundcake that turned out to be an enormous square block of blueberry poundcake. The girls as girls do talk about husbands and children and spa days and I zoned in and out of the conversation based on how close they were to a topic I could relate to. Concentrating on my food was highly satisfying and today was apparently "we will refill your coffee" day at bagel cafe. Some days, it's "we will ignore you until you are done with your meal, thereby avoiding having to refill your coffee" day, which is far less satisfying.

Every trip to my dad's house on the other side of town is still an adventure as I don't see seem to have a grasp on the most direct way there. As a family, we decided on a cooked at home meal tonight, barbecue and vegetables, which meant a family-sized trip to CostCo to get all the food. CostCo was always kind of a Saturday family destination, walking around sampling the fare on highlighted prepackaged foods and topped off with a hot dog and soda at the food court (no room today, thank you very much blueberry poundcake!) I poked through their shirt selection, but there's only so many short-sleeve Hawaiian prints one can have in one's closet.

If you weren't raised on CostCo, you might find this a strange way to spend an afternoon, but it's like going to the park for some families to play tag football, or sitting around the television watching football on TV for other families.

There's still more day to come! Don't change that dial just yet. Back to the airport (what are on, 5?) but first, back to the...Fashion Show Mall. You might think "wait, the mall again?" but my sister was having her trousers altered and apparently we were fairly lucky to have the alterations back the next day. Luck being relative, we arrived just in time for the runway show.

The runway itself, as I mentioned, is clearly marked along the floor but for the actual show (only Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays) it rises about two feet from the floor. Behind it, a small room raises completely out of the floor where the models change. Today was swimsuit show (sponsored by Macy's.) There were six girl bathing suit models and two shirtless guys in swim trunks. The show lasted 8 minutes, three changes of clothes and the obligatory last walk down the runway as a group (though in all the TV shows I've seen, the models clap their hands for the designers at the end. No clapping for Macy's.) They even had a man with a camera staged at the end of the runway to look like he was taking photographs of the models. It was all very amateur night. Some of the models looked like they had watched America's Next Top Model and were trying to imitate what a model was supposed to do. One had her left leg go one direction while her right leg fought to take off in the opposite direction. The hunky guy looked like he immensely enjoyed both hanging out on the beach with girls in bikinis and having a crowd of strangers watch him do it. It was a consummate acting job. (Seriously, think about it. Guy does 8 shows a day three days a week, smiling, looking like he's having fun. That's work. I don't smile once in the 50+ hours I work every week.) (Well, that and I'm fully clothed.) (Mostly.)

Still, for sheer entertainment value, it was tops. Laura's flight was late, so instead of hanging out at the airport like we did this morning, pulled into Caesar's Forum and did a once through. The Forum has been around for a decade now. It's high end shopping, usually brand names that I have never heard of, under the sales model of: if you have to ask the price, we shoot you on the spot and bury your body in the dumpster. I worked there when it first opened and it hasn't changed much. The Forum Shops was the first to innovate the changing sky. The ceiling is mocked up to look like the real sky and it changes from day to night over the course of the hour. (The newer such models imitate the exact time of day outside, but this was an early prototype.) The stores are...well like every where else out of my price and not of any particular interest anyway. There's an FAO Schwartz that's still open (most of the chain is gone) and the rest is really girl's stuff, clothing and jewelry and the like. We stayed to watch the Atlantis show. Talking statutes act out the last days of the lost city except the audio is so scratched you can't understand a word. It's oddly tacky, and not in a good way.

At my parents' house, after another rousing round of "where the hell are we now?" trying to drive there, we had dinner with a couple of their friends. My father fired up the grill and it was all very good. Though to my amusement, my step-mother set-up an adult's table and a kid's table. I suppose in the scheme of things, it was probably more congenial for everyone all around, but I haven't sat at a kid's table in 10 years so it raised all kinds of pimply teen angst I had felt since I ran away to college.

Since it was still early in the evening and dinner had wound down, Laura and I went to Red Rocks casino and had drinks at one of their bars. The bar had a weird piņata decor and the drinks sucked. But it capped a nice evening. And who can resist the opportunity to play "where the hell are we now?" twice in the same evening? I wish I could blame it on liquor consumption, but the truth is, I think my father lives in an alternate dimension that one must drive sideways to enter. Think about it.