Skirts

My parents got called on a mission, because they had grown a foot or two.

My parents, with four feet between them.

Back in August, before they left, I said I'd help my mother find appropriate clothing.  There were several things to bring on her list, but the hardest things to find were skirts.  She needed several conservative skirts: skirts that hung below the knee, but above the ankles.  Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be many available.  After spending a few hours in the outlet mall, finding short skirts and artsy long skirts and ridiculous maroon skirts cut diagonally that wouldn't match anything else, we ended up buying only a couple of blouses.

Then we took our search online.  

There were more options online.  Online, you can find cotton conservative skirts from Walmarty-like places for under twenty bucks, or fine and fancy wool conservative skirts from Italy for three hundred dollars.  For a couple of days, I left several websites open so I could show my mom what was available, and so she could pick out the conservative skirts of her dreams.  I clicked on lots of skirt ads in those days.  And then, after a long and thorough search, I had a couple of skirts shipped directly to her home in time for the Big Adventure.

And they lived happily ever after.

Except somehow, three months later, I'm still getting a lot of skirt ads in my web browser.  They're in the margins of my news sites, listed in the corner of my email inbox, and plastered across the top of a few other websites I check out occasionally.  They show quite lovely conservative skirts, if you happen to be shopping for a future missionary.  But I'm not.  My missionary is many thousand miles away. 

It's great that my websites know me, and know exactly what I am searching for.  

But how do you let the algorithms know that mother is already happy ever after, and that I don't need any more conservative skirts?  

Come on.  I want the car ads back.