February 2nd: Another day at the mall

King's Take:
Today was good.
We took the Manchester bus to get to the Mall of New Hampshire, then went to Best Buy to get a music CD. We got a Beatles CD of all their greatest hits.
We went to look for something for Mom, but I don't know. Miaka what were we looking for again? I'm not sure what it was.
Then we went to American Greetings to get a Valentine's card. Then we went to Bertucci's and got a Ultimate Bertucci pizza.
We looked for hats at Olympic Sports. But the hats were 20 or 30 or 10 dollars, which were too expensive for us, so we decided to do it later.
We're going to get a five-layer chocolate cake for dessert and then go home.
I'm sorry that we can't go to your apartment this time. Maybe next week.
We will box up leftovers and share a five-layer chocolate cake for dessert.

Miaka's take:
Woah, I totally forgot to write this up on Thursday when I was supposed to. *wince* I got distracted, sorry.
Mom dropped us off at the place where the buses all come, just before one of the buses that stops by the mall (three routes include a stop at the mall) was due to take off. We hurried a little, though it turned out we didn't really need to, we were in plenty of time for the bus (I think we were looking at a faster clock).  The bus fare is $1.50 each direction, and is of course per-person. With a little encouragement, and using my hand as a table, King pulled out 3 one-dollar bills, enough for two fares. Of course, these had to go into the fare box.
The fare box 'eats' dollars the same way your average soda machine does, but of course this part is pointed at the side where the door is, making it harder to reach if you're not standing on that side of it. Not a problem, generally, but this bus was designed to carry more wheelchairs than a normal bus can (not that I have any idea how a wheelchair-bound person is supposed to stick a dollar in the machine that's up next to the driver). The particular setup of this bus, with the location of the fare box, a couple half-wall partition-thingies (no idea what those are called, sorry) made it very difficult to access the dollar feed part of the fare box. If King had all quarters, we would've had no problem, as the coin-drop part was easier to reach. We had to deal with what we had, though, so dollars it was. Now, he has no trouble at all dealing with a soda machine, so it wasn't the feeder itself that was the issue. (He also had no trouble with the same feeder on a different bus later on.) It was all the angle. It's a lot harder to feed a dollar into the machine when you're standing on the side of it, than it is when you're standing directly in front of the feeder.  Attempting to get him to step into the 'in front of it' position wasn't working, and the partition kept me from getting to an angle where I could show him what I wanted him to do (he didn't seem to understand my directions to 'step up in front of it... no, that way, around the side').  I ended up reaching around him to get the bills started into the feeder, once he got them in close to the right spot. (Those dollar-feeder things are finicky at the best of times.)
Once we dealt with the fare box, finding a seat was actually pretty easy, and we spent the roughly half-hour ride looking out the window and talking. Every so often I would ask him what he saw out the window--he doesn't interpret the world the same way Archi or I do, so he tends to notice different things. It was almost a game, asking what he saw and then looking to find what he was reading off. (King reads signs and always has. These days he says something about the sign right away, while there's still a chance for someone else to read the same sign; quite the improvement over a time when he was little, when Mom remembers spending weeks trying to figure out what sign said 'No Trucks' after he asked about it.)
Once the bus dropped us at the mall, we headed straight for Best Buy to look at the CDs. King and I have (I think) very different tastes in music, so I don't think I was really much help. He ended up choosing a Beatles CD, as he mentioned. I did glance at the CDs myself, but I already knew I was unlikely to find anything to my taste.
CD in hand, we went over to the cell phone kiosk section of the store to do a little research for Mom. There were a number of blue-shirted employees there, so we got the attention of one of them and asked about a Bluetooth headset that didn't go in the ear. He was able to show us one immediately, and I took a picture of it with my phone (King does not have a cell phone of his own yet) and sent it off to Mom with the info. We thanked the employee for his help and headed out to the cash register to buy the CD.
Our next stop was a greeting-card store about halfway across the mall or so. I had mentioned to King that Valentines is coming up, and he decided that, yes, it would be a good idea to get a card for a close female friend of his. (She isn't his girlfriend, just a girl who is a friend.) We looked at perhaps 10 cards or so, and he chose an appropriate (and very cute!) card. I made sure he had the right envelope to put the card in, and we checked out.
Next stop: sport shop. King has taken up snowshoeing, and Mom wanted us to look for a hat and a 'turtle fur'. We found both hats and 'turtle furs' (though not the Turtle Fur brand), but we ended up not getting any. The good hats were around $30 and they didn't have any bright-yellow turtle furs. Turtle fur looks like good practice for someone (me) starting out with sewing, so I figure if I go buy some nice bright-yellow polar-fleece, I cane make one for him, and it'll be all the more warm and special for being handmade.
At that point we decided that both of us were getting hungry, so lunchtime was in order. Bertucci's wasn't busy at all, since it was between the average lunch and dinner hours, though late enough that we were restricted to the dinner menu. I think King's comments cover that part pretty well.
Once we finished eating and paid the bill, we realized that it was after 5pm, getting close on the last run of buses back to downtown. We hurried back to the food court, near where the buses drop off and pick up. It didn't take as long as I'd thought to get there, so we grabbed a table and I pulled out my bus schedule to check it again, wanting to make sure we didn't miss the last bus. I've had the unfortunate luck of getting stuck at that mall before due to missing the last bus of the day. Checking revealed that we still had a good bit of time before the very last bus of the day would come by, so, at King's request, we went to look in the Disney Store.
'Looking' at the Disney store turned out to consist of walking past the first two or three displays to stand in roughly the middle of the front section of the store, gazing around at the things on the walls and shelves for a few minutes. I tugged King over to one wall for a moment to get a closer look at a display of dolls; from halfway across the room it was hard to tell if a particular doll was Rapunzel or Aurora (upon closer inspection it was Aurora). Then we went to look at a display of Cars things, though it was all stuff for a boy of about five to ten years. I told King, "I think it's a little small for you." After that, he was thanking me for letting him look and suggesting we go catch the bus.
We made it onto the 5:30 bus, the first of the last round of buses. Paying the bus fare was a lot easier this time, partly because we were lined up correctly for the dollar feeder from the start, and partly because we dropped $2 in quarters into the change-eating part, which went a lot faster. The change collector is rather more forgiving, being somewhat funnel-like. Once again, there were plenty of seats, and we spent the ride watching out the window and chatting about all manner of things.  When the bus let us off at Veteran's park, we made our way across the street to wait in front of the Raddisson for Dad to pick us up, only we forgot to tell him exactly where we'd be. We waited out near the street, and he thought we'd gone into the lobby (where we would have been out of the cold). We were, however, able to connect readily enough, and thus ended the adventure comfortably.

Mall of New Hampshire

King's take:
We went to Ruby Tuesday.
We got a microphone from Best Buy.
We went to Ritz Camera.
I didn't want to go to the Disney Store. It was OK but going there would... I don't know.
I remember we're going to Starbucks at three. Or whenever Archi gets here.
The mall is tiring. I am getting tired.
We got a microphone at Best Buy. We tried looking for Christmas CD's, but they were sold out. Maybe next year.
We are wandering the mall, but I didn't see anything I wanted to look at.
We will go to Starbucks when Archi gets here. Then we will go to Miaka's place to watch Rayearth season 2. That is our list for today.
We are going to wander all around the mall and see if we find anything we want to look at.
(Later, while letting the ending and opening play between episodes of Rayearth)
We went to Ruby Tuesday. I got a burger and you {Miaka} got salad and we both got Sprites.
We went to Starbucks and I got a double chocolate brownie. It was yummy.
We went to Miaka's place to watch Rayearth season 2.
We went to Ritz camera and looked at the cameras.

Miaka's take:
Wow, King is good with product-placement for stuff he's interested in or excited about. Er, sorry, that's a bit off topic.
Today we went to the mall. Originally, the plan was to take the bus from the middle of town, but King seems to have a low-level cold (sneezing and coughs) so Mom wasn't sure she wanted him to ride the bus. Instead, she dropped us off at Ruby Tuesday. The place was pretty empty, the lunch rush over since it was nearly one in the afternoon, so we were seated right away and got our lunch quickly. While we ate, we talked over the things we needed and wanted to do in the mall today. Item number one on the agenda was to go to Best Buy and pick up a microphone that could be connected to my computer, so that the next time we do a movie review we don't have the issue with the sound being too quiet. Last week's review was that way because the microphone built into my laptop was too far from our mouths and didn't pick up our voices very well.
Lunch was good, and after we paid--I showed King a trick for figuring out the tip, but made him do the actual calculation--we headed out to the other end of the mall to run our errands.
Picking up the microphone was a snap, because Archi and I wandered around the mall a bit on Tuesday and I came in to see if they had anything that would work, and how much it would cost me, so I knew exactly where it was. We went right to the aisle and found that there was one left waiting for us. King had a bit of trouble getting off the hook, though. "It's stuck..." Looked to me like it had gotten caught on the price tag, and I jiggled it a little to get it off--King was not quite at the right angle. He decided that he wanted me to carry it, so I stuck it on top of the coats I was carrying and we headed off to run the next errand.
Mom had mentioned seeing Christmas music CD's for $5 at Best Buy, so we went over to the music department to look. When a quick check failed to reveal any Christmas CD's, we found a store employee and King asked. "Try the front of the store," we were told, so off we went to the front of the store. No Christmas music here. Slowly, we worked our way through the whole music department, checking each aisle. No dice. Or Christmas music, for that matter.
"I guess they must be sold out," I told King.
"They don't have any?"
"It doesn't look like it. Maybe next year."
King agreed that Mom might be disappointed, but there wasn't really anything we could do about it. If they were sold out, they were sold out, and we were out of luck. (Mom had seen the display at a different Best Buy.)
The next item on our list was to 'wander the mall'. I had to remind King that we needed to pay for the microphone first. I think the fact that there wasn't a line at the cash register confused him, as he stood in the walkway for a moment until I told him to look at the lit-up number sign some 10 feet in front of us and a little to our right. "Oh," he said, immediately walking over to the counter. "Um, we'd like to buy this," he told the cashier, whom he hadn't been able to see a moment before due to the positioning of a shelf. I set the microphone on the counter and went digging in my purse to find the rewards card, and then the gift-card I knew I had. We split the cost of the microphone, as it's going to be useful for both of us. There was a bit of a delay with locating the right denomination of bill, and then with trying to get the change back in his wallet. Sometime when we're not in the middle of trying to make a purchase, I will show him the trick of sorting money to make things easier to find.
Archi to change the time he planned on picking us up.
We wandered back out of the camera shop about the same time as I finished talking to Archi, and decided to meander on down the same hallway and see if anything else caught our eye. King decided that the soft chairs clustered into a sort of 'rest station' looked good, so we sat down for a few minutes. I pulled out the journal and we went over the events of the day and what else we had planned. Then we decided to go check out Game Stop, a little farther down the hall, just to see what games they had. Mom had told us she'd rather King not buy any more new games until he'd at least played all of the ones he got for Christmas.
We were looking at pre-owned Wii games when Archi called to ask which door he needed to meet us at. Arranging for him to pick us up at the same door we'd originally entered by, I set stuff down for a moment to help King into his coat and to put my own on. It's been getting cold lately, though it really ought to have gotten this cold at least a couple weeks ago.
Meeting up with Archi was no problem, and once in the car we headed for the nearby Starbucks, to get a snack for King and a drink for Archi and I. Because King wanted a snack, we decided we'd better go inside. Considering the long line at the drive-thru, this was probably the faster choice anyhow. King selected a brownie, Archi a hot chocolate, and I decided on a chai. I had to remind King to talk to the cashier, not the display case, but everything went smoothly. Archi and I were rather impressed with the ability to scan a card from the Starbucks app, instead of having to present the card. Snack and drinks in hand, we headed home.
As soon as we were in the door, King made a beeline for the chair in front of the TV (my living room isn't big enough for a couch) and dug into his brownie almost as soon as he was seated. He was mostly patient while I got the DVD in for him, and then located the TV remote so I could tell the TV to listen to the DVD player instead of a gaming console.
We had enough time to watch all of one disc and part of the first episode on the next disc before Dad came to pick King up. This series is not likely to last more than another week or two, at this rate. I rather wish I could figure out what's so special about watching stuff at my place that he could just as easily watch at his own house. His cough started bothering him partway through the first disc, so I made him some honey-water, which seemed to settle the cough pretty well.