the mall and glove love

Des Moines has lots of stores and lots of shopping malls and we went to the malliest mall of them all, the Jordan Creek Towne Center. Don't let that pseudo-quaint sounding name fool you, it's no strip mall. It's actually a pretty impressive mall- not that I'm much of a mall expert but apparently it's on the top 25 biggest in the country. Right below Pittsburgh Mills mall-
So yay for consumerism. I was pretty impressed though, it's a pretty spiffy mall with every imaginable chain store and a multiplex movie and all that jazz. If you walked in there, you would pretty much forget you were in the midwest and only a scant 45 minutes away from small town Ames. Not to disparage Ames... it has a pretty substandard mall though. So anyway, if anyone happens to find themselves in W. Des Moines sometime and wants the full-on mall experience, I would say, head over to Jordan Creek and you won't feel let down.
At this mall I acquired some new double layer, extra insulated gloves, which I am pretty excited about, for their potential to keep my fingers from freezing and feeling numb. While I am starting to get used to that, warding off hypothermia always seems like a worthwhile goal. They remind me of my extra thick bike gloves but they have actual fingers, instead of weird claw like mittens.