Thursday's e-mail had delivered to me something I really needed: a Barnes & Noble coupon for the weekend. My old Samsung tablet gave up the ghost—the battery swelled up and was popping the screen right off—so I had picked up another, and needed a case to keep it in. I didn't want a big heavy one this time, but a kimono sleeve instead, and I had already gotten a Go Strap to hold the tablet itself while I read. So to do something different James and I went to the B&N in Buckhead. There were no books out in any of the series James was reading, so he picked up a British magazine devoted to the Apollo 11 moon landing. I got the kimono, and also found three treats: in the $5 clearance bin was an interesting-looking book about life hacks. Also, their hardback discount books, usually $7 or $8 each, were two for $10. So I finally bought myself a copy of Walden (I've never read it, and this copy is nicely illustrated) and also a book you can't escape reading about if you've read Victorian children's literature: Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, also nicely illustrated with classic illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Walter Paget, and Robert Bell.

Since Publix was closed for Easter, we had to brave it to finish the shopping on the way home from the bookstore. We stopped at the big East-West Connector store, hoping it would be less crowded. Fat chance! It was a mob scene in there. We were glad to get home and relax for a little while until we went to supper at Fried Tomato Buffet and then stopped at JoAnn to use some coupons on do-it-yourself trays (actually wooden picture frames with deep frames) to put on top of the new "toy" chest.

Stayed up late watching this and that, including the rest of "Visit to a Hostile Planet" on Lost in Space.

Easter was a very quiet day. We got up late, dawdled, and finally James went downstairs to work in his man cave. I sat down to watch the usual Easter things: first Rankin-Bass' Here Comes Peter Cottontail, my favorite of their Easter offerings. I remember that at a bad time in my life its song "The Puzzle of Life" helped me cope with what was going on.

Next I put on the Addie Mills story The Easter Promise. I've made no secret that I consider The House Without a Christmas Tree a small masterpiece and its sequel The Thanksgiving Treasure a worthy followup. I've always been more ambivalent about the final two. The Valentine special, Addie and the King of Hearts, is riddled with clichès and was only an hour as compared to the usual ninety minutes. It was the only time the book version of the story was superior to the media version. The Easter Promise is much better, but suffered compared to the first two in being the first of the two that were not filmed in Canada in countryside that looked very like 1940s Nebraska. Instead it was made on a soundstage and looked like it. I love Addie and have always watched the stories from her point of view. This time I was suddenly watching it from Constance's point of view and found I enjoyed it a little better that way.

I also watched It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, in which the funniest gag isn't watching Marcy ruin every batch of Easter eggs they buy, but the wonderfully funny scene near the beginning of the story where the kids walk into the department store and it's decorated for Christmas already, and the Lutheran TV special with Benji and his sheepdog Waldo, Easter Is.

We had a great Easter dinner: shrimp scampi over linguine, wit a cucumber salad.

Labels: books, food, shopping, television

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