Put the umbrella down.

It's been awhile since I've posted. I've been busy with my new part-time writing job, which I just found out will be ending in a week. The site is shutting down. It's not a surprise, but I am disappointed. It was nice having an actual job that paid. But now I'll have more time for exciting, dangerous outings like the one the kiddos and I took yesterday-- to the mall.

We headed to the Burlington Mall yesterday to visit the Easter Bunny (or the Easter Dunny) as Cam says. After a quick visit during which Cam screamed his head off, I bribed the kids back into the stroller with some pretzels and headed to the elevator to go buy some jeans and stop at the playspace.

As I walking blissfully along, enjoying the minute of silence while the kids ate, a woman sidled up to me and said quietly, "Are you leaving?" It scared the crap out of me. No, I'm not leaving, I'm going to buy some jeans. And who the hell are you? But before I got any of this out, she said, "There's a man with a gun in the mall. I'm leaving, if they let us out...." And she walked away.

I didn't know what to think-- was this woman a lunatic who walks around malls telling people there's a gun somewhere? But then I looked to my left, and directly across the corridor was a real-life SWAT team, with shields, and rifles and bullet-proof vests. WTF!!! Seriously? I felt this surge of terror that I've never felt before. I looked down at my kids, happily eating their pretzels in the stroller and just felt this jolt through my body. There's a SWAT team with loaded guns 20 feet away, and my kids are sitting here, completely unaware, eating their snack. And those are the good guys! Who knows where this maniac with a gun is? Also, I felt angry. A SWAT team was walking around with guns, and there were tons of moms with kids in the mall, could they have let us known to get the hell out of there before we almost run into them on our way to the Gap?

Well, I felt all of those feelings in a span of three seconds, and then hightailed it out of there. And, as everyone knows, the man with the gun turned out to just be a man with an umbrella...that looked like a gun. Which leads me to the next question. Who buys an umbrella like that? I think police should keep an eye on him.