Woke to someone on NPR saying that Paula Ryan had been chosen to be Mitt Romney's vice presidential choice. Paula Ryan? Who's...

Never mind. Paul Ryan.

Thankfully, outdoors was much better than my hearing this morning. It was cloudy and only about 70 degrees; I don't think it's been that cool in the morning since...early spring. There was a slight, slight breeze, too.

The biweekly artists' market was this week, too, so we perused paintings and jewelry and hair decorations before proceeding across the street to the stalls. We bought sweet corn, more chicken salad, a piece of brown sugar pound cake for a dessert, some dog biscuits, and five nice hard, crisp peaches. On the way home we stopped at the bakery for dessert for two more nights, and also went to Publix for the twofers. We found a big table of clearance items and stocked up on some granulated bullion and four boxes of steel-cut oats, plus got more lamb "steaks."

Once these were put away, we went out to have a little more fun: we went to MicroCenter. :-) James was buying a keyboard and I was looking for more DVD cases for my incorporation project. The computer/laptop department was, expectedly, overflowing with parents and kids looking for tax-free goodies. The rest of the store was rather pleasant. I bought the cases and also found some thumb-drive holders with clips on them, and a packet of DVD-Rs so I could make copies for someone.

From there we went to the hobby shop, where I amused myself by reading Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. This is set in the same universe as her Doomsday Book, Blackout and All Clear, but is a comedy based on Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.. I tried reading it once before but wasn't able to get into it. Now I understand that all the confusion I had in the first chapter comes from the fact that the protagonist is exhausted from too much time travel.

Just for the heck of it, we went up to Books-a-Million. We stopped at the Petco next door and I bought a couple of new toys for Schuyler that I hope will alleviate her boredom. They were having pet adoptions and there were two of the cutest puppies. One was half chihuahua, half Italian greyhound, so bigger than a chihuahua, but smaller than the Italian greyhound, with big wide eyes. It saw us and ran to the crate bars, scratching and making happy noises. The other was part Labrador and part Welsh Corgi, and was small, with small paws, and Corgi-sized ears and a Lab-length tail. He was a beautiful wheat color, with an open, alert puppy face, and also very cute. There were several larger dogs, too, including a part Catahoula hound and one which was part Australian shepherd and a lovely merle color all over. Again, we have no idea how Willow would react to another dog.

And at this time of the year, it's just not conducive for adopting a puppy anyway.

Had a nice wander about Books-a-Million though there are no new autumn magazines out. They had some interesting sale books, including Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages, and the sequel to Our Own May Amelia. The orphan book was a buy one get one, so I got a small novel called Voyage about Jewish immigrants. I also found a neat book called Star Trek FAQ. Usually books with goofy names like this are cheap little trivia books with questions and answers at the back of the book. This is a history of the series, past experience of the actors, memorable episodes, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

We discovered that there was a Panera Bread across the parking lot, so we went there and picked up supper, but also stopped for a while just to have a treat. I had a plain bagel with garlic and herb cream cheese, and James had a chocolate chip bagel with honey walnut cheese. He wished they had peanut butter or Nutella to go with it.

Spent the rest of the evening comfortably at home watching The Big Bang Theory. Had our Panera for supper, recorded things off the BBC, blogged, and watched Schuyler give the evil eye to one of her new toys. It's a wooden tube with shredded twine at each end and some holes in the tube to access paper and string to shred. Hopefully she'll get used to it.

The first highlight of the evening was going down to the laundry room, pulling back the door and finding an untidy spider web behind it, with a great big daddy longlegs in the middle of it! By the time I asked James for a jar to try to take it outside with, it had scuttled behind the dryer in a great tangle of legs. I swept the web away—amazing! it wasn't there Tuesday when I did laundry.

The reason I was in the laundry room is that we had stripped the bed and I was washing sheets. If anyone asks us if we've had "vigorous physical exercise" this week, we can say "yes," because wrestling with our mattress is like putting the moves on a gorilla. It has baffles in it so we won't wake each other up with our restless sleeping, is heavy as you-know-what, and even though I dutifully measured the mattress and made sure the sheets I bought would fit it, the fitted bottom sheet always slips off. We have sheet "garters" to keep the corners on, but they are a stone-cold bitch to actually keep on on the sheets; the cloth always makes the knobs slip out of the metal. Just wicked annoying.

Labels: books, chores, dogs, food, insects, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:47:00 PM

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