24-25 May: Shop 'Til We Drop

Happy Birthday, Mom!

For variety we stopped at the Panera on Rochester Road for breakfast, then spent the morning shopping at Somerset mall in Troy. We had just enough time to buy John a new wardrobe of dress shirts at Macy’s and pick out some summer fashions for me at Eddie Bauer before we had to head back to Rochester for our dentist appointments. I had somehow managed to chip a tooth while eating a carrot a few weeks back, so I had that filed down. We picked up six months’ worth of prescriptions and contact lenses and then headed over to Rochester Mills again, where we had invited a bunch of our Michigander friends to join us for drinks and dinner. With my myriad medical tests out of the way, I rewarded myself with nachos and a buffalo burger washed down with a Rochester Red.

After yet another Panera breakfast and a quick stop at Home Depot to stock up on light bulbs, we spent virtually all day Thursday back at Somerset mall, completing our summer wardrobes. We had a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and then stopped at REI to buy me a heart rate monitor before heading back to Rochester. I had called the cardiologist this morning to ask about my test results and the woman who answered the phone was quite startled to hear that I was flying to Germany tomorrow and needed to know my results. She said the doctor would call me in a couple of hours, so I had to walk around with my cell phone in my pocket all day waiting for his call. He finally called when we were on our way to REI, but the connection was terrible – it sounded like the signal was traveling all the way to Germany and back. All I could make out was that my test results were fine and they wanted me to come in again when we get back from Germany. Well. That wasn’t exactly the informative discussion I was hoping for, but I will be going back to my doctor on Friday, so maybe she will be able to tell me more.

We bought four more bags of mulch (hoping it would help fight back the ever-advancing weeds over the summer), which I applied to the back beds in the sweltering late-afternoon sun. I was still frenetically digging up clumps of dandelions in the lawn when John finally told me to give it a rest. We walked to Sumo Sushi for dinner again and took some pictures of downtown Rochester to show to my friends back in Germany. After dinner I met my friend Nina for coffee; we relished the ability to walk up the street to Caribou and sit outside sipping iced lattes on this warm spring evening.