Hosting an Out-of-Townie

I got to play hostess to a friend who came in from out of town Saturday.

Actually, having moved from Tulsa to a distant, remote land of Indian casinos, a total lack of edible take-out and zero QuikTrip availability, she not only knows her way around Tulsa quite well, but she knows exactly what she wants to do when she gets here.

So, rather than allowing me to feel like a dignified know-it-all, she led me around my own dang town all Saturday long. She also insulted me, flashed me (many times) and bought me clothes along the way.

Without further ado, this is my friend:Come on, don't be shy.
That's Amanda. Sorry I blew out all the color in your face, Amanda. I'm still getting the hang of my camera, Amanda. Thank you for understanding, Amanda.

In those pictures, she's getting ready to split a delicious lunch of sausage and mushroom pizza with me at The Stonehorse Cafe in Utica Square. That pizza continued Stonehorse's flawless track record of supplying me with fall-on-the-floor amazing food.

The dining room is cozy, too:That's half of the dining room. Hey, so what if there's not much seating? You won't need a seat at Stonehorse; you'll be too busy flailing about on the floor in fits induced by overwhelming deliciosity.

The bar area. Lovely, huh?

We fell into Stonehorse only after spending the previous hour at Ihloff Salon and Day Spa, also in Utica Square. Amanda will come clear from land-of-no-shopping just to get her hair trimmed there.
See that? That's a smack-bottom awesome hair cut.

That is...well, that's me. Not even an Ihloff stylist can rein that in.

Amanda was dead-set on spending the day shopping for new pants. Since the first of the year, Amanda has lost 20 pounds and 4 pants sizes, so pants that fit are now in rare supply at her house. Punk.

This is what Amanda looked like last Halloween: See her there, hiding her body behind a Nike sweatshirt and a lovable attitude? Sad. Just pitiful.

By the way, I am nearly five months pregnant in that photo, so if you make fun of me for being fat, well, you're mean.

Here's the last photo I have of us from back in the good ol' days when I weighed less than her...
...which was nearly three years ago.

Sigh.

Here's what she looks like now:So hot that she can even pull off one of those dresses that looks like a UPS uniform. She wanted me to put, "What can brown do for you?" under this photo, but I thought that might come off, I don't know...racist.

Can you tell Amanda likes to try on LOTS of clothes? Yeah. She's sort of awful to shop with, at least for a girl who wouldn't name shopping to her top-ten list of favorite pastimes. In fact, shopping is on my top-fifty list of favorite pastimes, right under washing pacifiers for the third time in a day and looking down at the scale in the morning only to realize I outweigh Amanda by 30 pounds.

Sigh again.

Amanda's shopping prowess comes in handy enough, I guess. She helped me find a super-nice suit jacket that had been marked down nearly 90 percent. It's a good thing she was with me, or else I might have purchased something more along the lines of: This. Ooooohhhh this.

That suit is real. I found it at Stein Mart, right here in T-Town, during a self-piloted shopping trip. I didn't buy it, but I should have. My kitchen is now decorated in pineapples, solely because of this photo and the family joke it has become.

After three or four hours of blitz-style shopping activity, I had to bail. That's kind of hard when the Woodland Hills shopping mall is this busy:
I go to the mall maybe - MAYBE - three times a year, so I was sort of caught off guard by the size of the crowd. All of these people can't believe that the best thing to do in this town on a Saturday afternoon is to go to the mall...

Can they? I don't know. I did for a day, I suppose. But it was all Amanda's fault.