Well, I've used up all my extra leave, except for the day I need in the fall for the library sale and an emergency day, so this is my last Friday off for two weeks ::sob:: I hate getting up at six in the morning! So today I left the alarm and woke up naturally, which was about nine o'clock and dozed on and off for another half hour.

Then it was time for dog-walking. This took a while as I actually didn't walk the dog, just tied him out as I took the Easter things off the porch (finally) and trimmed some of the nandina. Tucker was actually pretty good; he never went in the street, although he could have. When we got in, he begged to go out on the deck; I finished Grace Against the Clock, washed a few dishes, made the bed, and put some things away. I got  up so late I actually ended up having some lunch instead of breakfast. Then I decided to go to the South Cobb library. I discovered that before Christopher Fowler had begun writing his Bryant and May mysteries, he wrote some urban horror books that featured Bryant and May. South Cobb had one of them, Rune, so I wanted to borrow it. Well, when I walked in, right with the new books was an autobiography of Katherine Paterson, and I also found one of the American history books that was on my Amazon wish list, The Expansion of Everyday Life, 1860-1876.

Then I wanted to check out The Book House, a book store on Veteran's Memorial Highway that we found one Sunday, but it is closed on Sunday. I thought this was a remainder book store, like the one on the main street at Pigeon Forge, but it is a used book store just crammed with books upon books, doubled up on shelves, stacked up in corners. As always, at least a fourth of the store is devoted to old romances (this happens in all used book stores). But in the back I find old children's library books, a good collection of old science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks (Larry Niven! Jerry Pournelle! Christopher Stasheff! Clifford Simak!), biographies cheek by jowl with history books, true crime crammed in a corner where it belongs, and up front behind a bookcase of classics a small bookshelf of Christmas books and right near the front a big double-shelved collection of old books including Whitman TV tie-ins. I picked up one book called A History of the World War (didn't look at the copyright but with that title, definitely pre-1939) and folded inside was a Chautauqua program. There was a paperback reprint of Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes with a front cover featuring Ron Ely, star of NBC's 1960s Tarzan series.

The one thing I didn't find was the mysteries; I'm sure they were there somewhere!

I bought two of Joe Wheeler's Christmas in My Heart books (these are short story collections with the stories taken from magazines from the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and one of the Sutton series of Christmas books, this one The Great British Christmas. Amazingly, the cashier told me all the thousands of books in the store are indexed on computer; they cataloged them starting in 2005 and now catalog everything that comes in. Wow.

I thought I'd stop at Ollie's to see if they had any of the "Angel Treats" I'd gotten earlier in the year, dark chocolate Hershey squares. Alas, they are now malted milk balls (barf) and sugar free milk chocolate (barf two). I did pick up two "Dear America" books for more than 75 percent off the list price.

On the way home I dropped the plastic grocery bags at Publix for recycling. Once I got home I found my shipment from Hamilton Books on the doorstep. Several of the books were for eventual gifts, but I had a few inexpensive goodies for myself: Connie Willis short stories, Susan Cooper's bio of John Langstaff (of the Christmas Revels), a David Crystal book about English that was only $2, a mystery featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde (we were talking about the two of them at 221B), and the beautiful illustrated version of Bill Bryson's At Home at 70 percent off. The only pricy thing in the shipment was The Collected Days, the three-book compilation of H.L. Mencken's memoirs.

I fell asleep reading Rune (not because it was boring but because the sun always drains energy out of me) and didn't wake until James arrived home. We went to fetch supper from Dragon 168, taking Tucker with us; he had a ball sticking his head out the window. Later we watched the news to see what kind of storms are heading our way (it went from bright sun with a winter sky and a breeze when I was at the library to flat grey and humid by the time James got home), Doctor Who, and last night's Big Bang Theory.

Labels: books, chores, Christmas, dogs, pets, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 10:18:00 PM

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