I spent all day shopping today because I need to find a gown to wear to a dance Halloween weekend. My friend Ryan is flying out from California to hang out and go to a swing dance at Glen Echo, and naturally I feel I should be properly attired. Unfortunately ‘ugly’ is the new black this season. After a huge outlet mall, three different Nordstroms, and a desperate attempt at Saks Fifth Avenue, I was still surrounded by ugliness. What’s wrong with these designers? Do they have no taste? Did they just decide to take the year off and let their three year old kids doodle all over their sketches? No, scratch that, their three year olds could probably design better gowns than what’s out there right now.

I swear, at the first Nordstrom, I wish I would have had a camera. There was this black satin jacket-dress with – I kid you not – a rainbow petticoat made of nasty tulle. I’m talking bright neon rainbow, piled around the bottom of this dress. It looked like a reject from couture clown school. So not only did the bottom of the dress form a funny mushroom shape, but it was hideously tacky. Worse than the tackiness was the price – who would pay $500 for that crap?

Alas, not only were things ugly, I couldn’t find anything that fit. Suffice it to say, until I can open my own clothing store named for Jayne and Marilyn, I shall refrain from buying clothes off the rack. It just can’t be done.

After finally settling on making my own dress, I drove home around 9:30pm. As I attempted to pull up into my driveway, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something hopping. I slammed on the brakes just in time to save a poor chubby little toad from a squishy fate. He was hopping along my driveway and proudly stopped right where my tire needed to go in order to get into the garage.

It was really quite exciting – I hadn’t seen a frog in *ages*. I made my Mom get out of the car and herd the toad out of the driveway. Immediately she started saying, “I’m not gonna touch it!” So I had to pull up some old memories from my childhood in Mississippi, as the president and founder of the infamous Vicksburg Frog and Toad Club, and thus educate my Mother on the artform that is Frog Herding. She successfully got the toad to visit the mailbox so I could pull into the garage. As soon as that car was off, I leapt out and chased after it. It was too dark to catch him, which is really unfortunate. I was enjoying that frolic down memory lane.