Will you tell me how a three-day weekend goes by faster than one day at work? Yeah, I haven't figured it out either.

I always set the alarm for eight hours after bedtime when I have a compressed day off; no use in wasting time sleeping! This is why I had my head under a pillow for 45 minutes on Friday morning trying to ignore the alarm. :-)

After the usual breakfast and dog walk, it was errand time. Got in the car to discover that somewhere on the way home yesterday (probably on I-285 westbound), Twilight's odometer went over 100,000 miles. (This isn't rare in the company I keep. James' truck is already over 100,000, and I know Ron's Honda hit way over 200,000, and Lin's van, too. Jessie's car just went over 160,000.)

Tucker's old bone doesn't have its bounce anymore (it got wet), so I went from Target to Walmart in an effort to find one. Nope. Stopped at Barnes & Noble at the Avenue at West Cobb since I had a coupon, but nothing jumped out at me except for the "Muzak," which was a men's chorus singing "Let It Go." This song, guys—can't we just let it go????

Since I was across the street from the Dallas Highway Kroger, I went over and did the shopping, including picking up some chicken thighs for Sunday supper. They didn't have a bone either. I have a feeling Hartz has quit making them. I also gassed up the car and briefly stopped in one more Target. No bone. I bought him another toy, a rubber cylinder that has a similar a bounce to the bone. [It's an unpredictable bounce, though; it usually goes backward instead of tumbling end over end. But he seemed to like it.]

When I got home, I had a nice surprise on the computer: my copy of Pioneer Girl is on its way! Back before Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the "Little House" novels, her daughter encouraged her to write down her memories of homesteading. Unlike the novels, which are neatened up for children and sometimes changed ages and names of people (for instance, when the Ingalls family lived in Kansas on the prairie, Laura was only two years old and most of the book is written from the recollections of her mother's stories), this handwritten-on-school-tablets manuscript, called Pioneer Girl, was everything Laura remembered about her journeys, even the frightening thing: the brother of a woman she was nursing almost assaulting her, a woman who tried to adopt her when the Ingalls family was having hard times, passing by a house in which all the occupants had been murdered, and more). Later she mined the manuscript for her children's books. However, a lot of fans were still interested in that manuscript, and you used to be able to order a photocopy of it from the South Dakota historical society. Finally they published it in December with copious historical notes. I forgot to order it for my birthday and when I checked the other day, Amazon was out of it, Barnes & Noble was out of it—in fact, the publisher was out of it. They've done two print runs of 30,000 copies total, and now they're about to do a third. I figured I would have to wait until I found a copy available through Books-a-Million. Or not. First they told me they were having trouble getting it. And then this e-mail when I got home. Neat.

I did some chores and had some Christmas music on until James came home. After trying fruitlessly to log in to TuneIn Radio on the television with my phone account, I just created a new one and found a nice quiet station to read magazines to. We had dinner at West Cobb Diner. Both of us were too tired to do anything else, so we came home and watched Blackadder Goes Forth, which is leaving Netflix tomorrow.

On Saturday James went off to work. This time I did get up at 8:30, did breakfast and the dog walk, vacuuming while Tucker enjoyed himself on the deck keeping an eye on the squirrels. I also refilled the birdseed can and filled the bird feeders; at this rate I'm not going to have any birds to watch during the bird count. Then I sat down to watch An Adventure in Space and Time, the movie about the creation of Doctor Who. This film still astonishes me; even though I know Doctor Who got on the air, the first half is like a suspense film: will lone female producer Verity Lambert and lone Indian director Waris Hussein conquer the Good-Old-Boys club at the BBC and get the show produced? David Bradley also puts in a touching performance as William Hartnell, who realizes his memory is becoming faulty and fights against his fate as hard as possible.

Unfortunately I was developing a sinus headache from the incoming rainstorm forecast for tomorrow and finally had to go lie down for an hour. When I got up I went outside to check the mail and found my box from Hamilton Books outside. I did a big order just as the blizzard started up in New England and was surprised that it shipped so soon and arrived so quickly. Most of the shipment was to be put away for Christmas gifts, so I was just starting an inventory of what I had in the boxes and assigning gifts to people when James arrived home early. I stowed his books away before he'd climbed the stairs. I did get a couple of books for me that I have always wanted, a book of photographs and family documents collected by William Anderson in Laura's Album (ever want to see what the real Nellie Oleson looked like?), and The Sound of Music Family Scrapbook, which comes from collections kept by the SOM kids and their parents.

We went to a little pizza parlour on Spring Road, DaVinci's. It looks like a little place you might find in Brooklyn, a few tables and that's it. The pizza is excellent, but it's a lot more economical at SteviB's. We also went to the Barnes & Noble at Aker's Mill, but neither James and I saw anything we wanted. So it was home again to faithful terrier and singing bird, and later on I chatted with Mike.

Today we slept in, had breakfast, and, because nothing else was going on, decided to go into Buckhead to see what their Barnes & Noble had to offer. We stopped at Publix first to pick up a couple of twofers I had coupons for and some eggs, and at Nam Dae Mun, the mostly Asian-and-Hispanic farmer's market in the old Winn Dixie store on Spring Road to pick up some black sauce and roasted garlic teriyaki sauce. We also picked up some wafer thin pork chops and some nice looking lamb shoulder. They had whole lambs and whole goats in the freezer section, and something called "burned goats head" which was exactly as described. I wonder whose delicacy this is. Why do you burn it first, I wonder?

Finally did find something in Buckhead, the paperback version of Making Masterpiece, by the executive producer of Masterpiece Theatre, plus some tissue paper and holiday things in the clearance bin. On the way home we were both hungry (it was after two and we hadn't had lunch), so stopped at Panera. I had my usual, but James had one of the new broth bowls, the soba noodles with chicken. The broth was very gingery, but I could see where it would be good if you had a cold and were really congested.

We watched the Puppy Bowl—I got a kick out of the little goats that were "cheerleaders" as well as the kittens "taking over" the control room instead of doing the halftime show—then had chicken for supper and watched AFV and Alaska State Troopers. Darn. It's the last season for Alaska State Troopers.

Labels: books, chores, errands, food, movies, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:41:00 PM

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