Freaky things and shopping trips

I'm not really a mall kind of person. In fact, they rather freak me out. The only mall I've ever been to in Austin is Highland Mall. I went there the first time with my parents and my sister when they were visiting, once a few weeks ago with Josh to get new lenses for his glasses at Lenscrafters, and the third time was tonight when I made a trip to the Victoria's Secret to buy some lingerie as a gift for a lingerie shower this weekend.

Freaky thing #1: The grackles at Highland Mall. I have always been a little scared of birds, although after five years in Austin with grackles all around being scary and pigeons all over campus, I'm comparatively calm when a bunch of birds are around. And I've seen giant groups of grackles before -- when I used to walk to work, there would be hundreds of them in the trees by the student services building in the morning. The amount of grackles by Highland Mall at dusk was insane. Scary insane. Like every tree was filled with them, all the buildings were lined with them, the sky was full of them flying around and there were hundreds of them just sitting in the parking lot because they couldn't all get a tree perch. When I got back to my car, there were dozens of grackles surrounding it, and four sitting on top. The trees were basically raining bird poop. Like you could hear it plopping down all around. And the birds were so loud with their crazy grackle calls that you couldn't even carry on a conversation outside.

I really like Victoria's Secret's panties, so while I was there picking out my gift, I also grabbed some nice sensible cotton panties for myself. I've only been inside a Victoria's Secret one other time, and this is the first time I'd really shopped around in there. Usually I order my stuff through the catalog or on the internet, which is my preferred shopping method. On the internet, freaky thing number two never happens.

Freaky thing #2: When you buy panties and such at VS, they wrap them up in tissue paper, put them in a fancy bag, and then squirt some perfume into the bag. Isn't that strange? I've never seen anyone do anything like that in my life.

I was going to do more shopping at the mall after going to VS, but the combination of birds and perfume turned me against it. I'm sure I just would have run into more freaky things.

The whole trip, however, was completely worth it for another thing I found out about Victoria's Secret. If you are buying a gift, they give you this awesome folded free shrink-wrapped gift box. It is totally fun to assemble when you get home and it comes with two sheets of pink tissue paper. I've decided everything I ever buy at Victoria's Secret from now on will be a "gift" because I love these boxes.