Ah, well, not as cool this morning as yesterday, but we didn't care as we were sleeping in (except for when James had to take Willow out) and having a long, leisurely breakfast of toast and jam.

We put a "Splendid Table" on the player and had a nice drive out through back roads to Acworth. We used to take Lost Mountain/Mars Hill Road, but it's become so built up that the traffic has increased, and it's especially bad when you reach the two churches in a row after going past the "dueling supermarkets." Now we go through West Sandtown and then Due West, which has widely-spaced properties interrupted by little pastures dotting either side of the road with grazing horses (and in one case, a cow!).

I wanted to go to Books-a-Million today to see if they had the new "Country" (because the issue with the fall photos should be out). This was a bad idea. :-) Instead, I found Star Trek FAQ 2.0, which covers the films and Next Gen, and also what is probably one of a dozen books that is coming out for the fiftieth anniversary, Doctor Who: Celebrating Fifty Years. Also picked up the 2014 mini-Susan Branch calendar, which I had to go searching for last year, a fall cross-stitch magazine, a Christmas magazine, and the Fall Preview "TV Guide."

When I was a kid, the Fall Preview "TV Guide" was a big thing. It used to come out right after Labor Day, if you went to the right store (others didn't put it out until Friday, the day before the local listings started, and who wanted to wait that long?). I'd come home from the first day of school and walk the almost mile to Food Town, or, later, the over a mile to Thall's Drugstore to get that "TV Guide." Eventually I started keeping big scrapbooks of my favorite shows and would end up buying two issues, because inevitably two shows I liked were on either side of the page from each other. Mom wouldn't let me keep all the issues, either, or I would have bought them every week and had a nice collection up in the attic, but I was allowed to keep the Fall Previews. I have them going back to 1961. So when I finally did get a subscription, after I went to work, I had to tear the articles I liked out of it. But the subscription inevitably arrived late (thanks, USPS!), sometimes even after the date it was supposed to start, so I still went to Thall's to get my Fall Preview early. :-)

Let's face it, "TV Guide" quit being fun once they didn't do regional issues anymore. I used to collect a "TV Guide" every time we went on vacation because the programming in each region was different. Seacoast towns had boat reports and fishing shows and beach programs; mountain towns had hunting shows, tourist-related programs; the Midwest had farm reports and 4H programming and chatter about grain stocks. You could check out the local children's hosts, see what reruns they had on before prime time programming, who the news hosts were, and see how funny it was that prime time started at six o'clock in Colorado, leading to many stations with movies or old Alfred Hitchcock shows on after 9 p.m. Once cable entries started, the same everywhere, it was the beginning of the end. But I have "TV Guides" to bring back nice memories: of the miniature golf courses in Lake George, flying to Pittsburgh for a Space: 1999 convention, the long flat golden plains of Kansas and the long flat green plains of Nebraska, walking the "old" Strip (with the Sands, the Dunes, the Stardust, the Frontier) in Las Vegas, riding down Lombard Street in San Francisco and visiting CBS Television City in Los Angeles. I even have a pseudo-"TV Guide" in French from Quebec, which brings back a sunny morning at the Citadel, the overlook of the St. Lawrence, Ste. Anne de Beaupre, and the flower-girded Provincial Buildings.

Anyway, done at the bookstore, we had a short lunch at Panera, and then went to the Kroger a few shopping centers down. This has to be the worst-arranged Kroger I have ever been in (and the old Smyrna Kroger was pretty bad). The bread was at one end, wedged behind produce and the health food, and the bakery at the other, and the aisles have no rhyme nor reason to them. Eventually we found what we were looking for and headed home, stopping by Publix for a couple of twofers on the way. Once I'd gone out and filled up my car, we were done—of course, by then it was supper time.

Bought some chicken legs for supper and cooked them while finally watching Broadchurch. We've had five episodes stacked on the DVR. Unfortunately part two was almost a half-hour short (probably the result of a thunderstorm that night), but thankfully there are detailed synopses on the IMDb. Excellent all 'round; a nice complex mystery threaded in with the portrait of a close-knit community horrified by the death of a little boy. David Tennant plays the world-weary detective worn down from a mistake made on a former case well, except his Dr.-House-like five-o'clock-shadow looks entirely too groomed (and why would any police department allow him to go around looking like that?). Can't wait for the final three parts!

Did not realize the first of the four (?) new Foyle's War episodes were starting on GPB tonight and missed it completely. I can only hope WPBA will start running it in a week or two so we can catch that episode again.

Labels: books, food, magazines, television

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