At this moment, it's quite gloomy out, thunder rumbling and booming overhead (which means the dog is figuratively glued to my side). I'm not surprised it's brewed up a storm out there, because when I first heard the thunder, I went outside to refill the bird feeders, and there is not a breath of air; it's like stepping into a pizza oven fired all the way up to 100°F (that's with the heat index). The birds are used enough to me that the tiny brown-headed nuthatches and the chickadees will come back to the feeder if I stand very still near the back door (a distance of about ten feet), but I couldn't stay out there more than five minutes trying to breathe that awful air.

Since James not only had to work today, but got the rotten shift (noon to nine), we decided we would go to the Farmer's Market and have breakfast at one of the small places that open on Saturday mornings for the market. It was almost 80 already when we left the house at 8:40, but the sun wasn't too strong. I just clapped on my trusty "straw" hat and James his boonie cap before we left.

They were having a "Christmas in July" celebration on the Square today, so the parking spaces were at a premium, but we did pull in to one relatively close. There was an elderly man standing at the rear of the vehicle next to us, in overalls, a work shirt, and wearing one of those John Deere-type square caps, looking the very image of a country farmer. He grinned as we got out and said "I saved this one just for you," and we laughed. He then added that back in the old days, the area would have been filled with mules from the farmers coming into town on Saturday. They used to park them on the square, he told us, and they were such a nuisance that "old man Glover" (the gentleman that the park in the center of the square is named for) finally came out and told the farmers if they didn't park elsewhere he'd pull up every tree in the square so they wouldn't tie up to them. Around here that wasn't so long ago; farmers came into small Southern towns on Saturday via mule and wagon well into the 1940s and 1950s.

We wandered down the length of the market, buying two huge cucumbers, James some boiled peanuts, and a huge tomato, and then turned into the next aisle and decided to eat at the North Park Bistro. We chose a table next to the building for its shadyness, and it pretty much remained that way except for a small portion of sun, and watched the world go by. Much fun watching the dogs: saw many poodle and poodle crosses, a Scottie, a Westie, a huge St. Bernard puppy, several corgis, a bold Australian shepherd, a striking harlequin Great Dane, a dog that looked like a cross between some type of hunting hound and a Dalmatian, and of course the usual rescue greyhounds.

Breakfast was good (I had a whole-wheat waffle with strawberries on it and James had some type of Southwestern crepe with fruit on the side) but it took ages for James to get his because the order was wrong. There was a couple not closely watching their pair of active boys, and the smaller one (maybe age four?) ran in to the restaurant and then we heard a crash. We had our backs to the doorway, so I'm not sure if the little boy caused it or it just happened at the same time, but an older lady who had been sitting at the counter inside on a tall wrought-iron chair was on the ground as one of the welds of the chair supports had broken. The little boy could have bumped into it, I suppose. The woman appeared to be okay.

While we were waiting for our meal, James bought more garlic dog biscuits for Wil, and I got a baguette, and then when we had finished we picked up some more goat cheese. As we were walking to the car, the inevitable: a train was approaching. We stood in the shade of the buildings and watched the different cars go by—closed and open boxcars, hopper cars, tanker cars. It had that hot, metallic scent that brought me back to the bowels of the old Union Station in Providence, or Penn Station in New York, or even the underground tunnels of the T in Boston.

There was just enough time to put up things before James had to pack his lunch, grab his things, and go off to work. Usually I wander off to Michaels or JoAnn when he spends a weekend day at work, but I'd already spent too much from this paycheck (the mortgage payment, and some perfect birthday/Christmas gifts found in various catalogs; the last of them came today in the mail) and didn't want to go out in the Fry Daddy atmosphere. So I put on cool things, and did various activities, like vacuum just a little (something is caught in the vacuum and after a few minutes there is a burning smell; but the stupid thing is so difficult to dismantle I just quit vacuuming), wash the kitchen floor, and logged on briefly to work to forward a dozen 653s to the Small Business office and write a stern letter to a company that submitted three more invoices than they should have. Also watched most of a show on the RFD channel called R5Sons, about the family that runs the Rainy Pass Lodge in Alaska along the Iditirod Trail. The episode took place during the race, in fact. Afterward I started watching Change Your Brain, Change Your Life on one of the PBS channels, but turned it off when the thunder began.

Speaking of watching television, the TV was fixed with little fanfare. A slight man appeared on our doorstep yesterday morning, noted the clicks, then opened the back of the television—you should have seen Schuyler crane her neck at him, trying to figure out what was going on—to reveal something that looked like the motherboard on a computer. It actually took the guy longer to put the back of the television back on than to fix the problem, which was a broken diode. In thirty minutes he was gone and Schuyler quit looking grumpy.

To be frank, I didn't miss the thing much. We watched the news on the computer, and didn't even care to drag the little television from the spare room to watch Jeopardy, although I did miss another go at Pie in the Sky. I've been too busy reading Christopher Plummer's book In Spite of Myself.

Labels: books, food, shopping, television, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:27:00 PM

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