This afternoon, Brad and I had an appointment in Bloomington, on the other side of the cities from where we live, and just around the corner from the Mall of America. After the appointment, we found ourselves facing a very long rush-hour drive back to our house, so we decided to spend some time at the Mall of America until traffic died down a little bit.

The first interesting thing we saw was that they were filming what appeared to be an infomercial at the mall.

When we first walked by, the actors/announcers/whatever they are were just getting ready to go on stage. The "doctor" was donning his white coat. Later on, we walked by again and they were actually filming, reading from a teleprompter. I assumed they'd be filming at the Mall of America in order to have an audience, so the strangest thing about this was that there was no audience; they weren't even using speakers. So we could see their mouths moving, but we couldn't hear what they were saying. Very strange. Maybe we were just witnessing some kind of elaborate dress rehearsal?

The second unexpected thing we ran into was at the Barnes & Noble at the mall. We had just gotten coffee and were looking for a place to sit, when I noticed a whole pack of knitters. I thought at first that it was a knitting group, but they were all facing the same direction. That was when I realized they were getting ready for a book reading. Apparently, I've been living in some kind of cave all these years not knowing about the existence of Crazy Aunt Purl. I had, in fact, seen her book, Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split at some point, but that was the extent of it.

Pulled in by the gravitational force of a group of knitters all concentrated in one place together (the lure amplified by the fact that for once I actually had a knitting project with me in public, as I'd been prepared for waiting around in doctor's offices), I convinced Brad that he'd like nothing more than to hang out in Barnes & Noble for a few hours while I basked in the glow of fellow knitters.

So it was that I had the unanticipated pleasure of listening to Laurie Perry's delightful Southern accent. I bought her book, but didn't stick around for the signing because I was so far at the back of the line and we really needed to eat some dinner. And I'm sure I'll now be joining the rest of the knitting world and reading her blog.