Susan, her mom, and the kids are in Ireland this week for spring break, and I’m in Oklahoma.

As I mentioned last week, I am wrapping up my novel for my final school project. If everything goes according to schedule, I’ll be turning my novel in during the second week of April, and defending it two weeks later (after the members of my committee have had time to read it).

I started work on my novel last September, and over seven months, things have a way of changing. For example, one of my characters started the book with long blonde hair, and by the end, somehow it had morphed into a red-orange pixie cut. Oops. In another chapter, I noticed that one of my characters magically teleported from one location to another. Also, oops. Fixing all the grammatical errors that pop up is an important part of editing, but I’m finding that’s the easy part. It’s harder to catch all those little flaws in logic, especially now that I’ve read my manuscript backwards and forwards a dozen times. The story makes sense to me; whether it’ll make sense to someone coming in fresh remains to be seen.

At the beginning of spring break I promised myself two one-day trips, but I’m behind (my own self-imposed) schedule and decided to cut it back to one. This morning, I drove to Tulsa with a list of antique malls I wanted to visit. For whatever reason, the antique malls in Tulsa seem to have more of the types of things I’m looking for (vintage lunchboxes, 70s/80s toys, and DVDs) than the ones located near me. Plus, it’s always fun to take a mini road trip and go exploring.

In you Google “antique malls in Tulsa” the first three hits are I-44 Antique Mall, Generations Antique Mall, and Next Generations Antique Mall, which are the three I visited today (along with one thrift store). I found a ton of great things, including two lunch boxes (Fall Guy and Annie), a Sesame Street thermos (I already have the lunch box), a Garfield alarm clock, three Muppet Babies figures, a Pac-Man coffee mug, a World’s Fair hat, a Karate Kid action figure, one book, and one CD.

I also found 15 DVDs and Blu-ray discs: Season One of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries, Lords of Dogtown, Total Recall, Vanishing Point, Jackass 1 and 3, Milk, The Goonies, The Thing, Zero Dark Thirty, Superbad, Big Trouble in Little China, The Rise and Fall of ECW, The Black Dahlia, and Fargo. I’ve seen almost all of those movies, but most (if not all) had extra features that warranted purchases (including the two-disc special editions of Superbad and Big Trouble in Little China). DVDs were $2/each and Blu-rays were $3.

My shopping excursion offered a nice mental break from multiple days of sitting behind a computer, editing a novel.

Kiss the Blarney Stone for me, guys, and I’ll see you in a few days.