The simple things make me happy

I was out on the town kind of late last night and was too tired to post when I got home. A dear friend of mine is in town for the holiday and we indulged in some of our favorite activity -- shopping! We went out late enough for the wackiness of the day-after-Christmas bargain hunters to have died down, thankfully.

If you know me, you will not be at all surprised to hear that, while we were shopping after dinner, I needed to find a ladies' room. We ended up in Nordstrom's and, as it's someplace I don't shop often, I hadn't been in their loo recently. I'll be sure to stop back there next time I'm in the area and in need, though, because it held a delightful surprise!

Public bathrooms are always a crap shoot (pun only semi-intended), aren't they? I generally dread using them but have no choice, so it's always lovely to find a decent one, let alone one that actually brings a smile to my face. But that's what happened last night.

Before I tell you why, though, allow me to digress for a moment. All this talk of public restrooms reminds me that there's a site devoted to this very subject. According to their homepage, "MizPee finds the closest, cleanest toilets in your area," and it's accessible by your mobile phone for those desperate, "there's gotta be one around here somewhere" moments. I haven't had occasion to use it yet, but you can believe it's going to be marked as a favorite on my phone! I checked and can't find this Nordstrom's restroom (it's the Valley Fair one, if anyone local is wondering) on MizPee, but I'm going to submit it as soon as I'm more familiar with the site.

So, what was the surprising factor, already? The hand dryers have been replaced by what at first I thought were Dyson Airblade dryers (which excited me to no end, because I've seen the commercial for them and I'm already half in love with James Dyson because he's so freaking brilliant and has a great voice), but were actually Mitsubishi Jet Towel, high-speed hand dryers. Same concept, same wonderful result. These things are awesome! Exactly as Dyson says in his commercial, there's no giving up and wiping your still-wet hands on your pants; the air moves the water off your hands in a matter of seconds and takes it down into a collection area, not in a puddle on the floor underneath the dryer -- something that annoyed me about traditional, ineffectual "hot" air hand dryers almost as much as their inability to actually dry my hands -- and there wasn't a carelessly discarded paper towel in sight. It just seemed so sanitary and efficient and environmentally sound.

I left with clean, dry, un-chapped hands and I was a happy, happy girl.