pensees d'été
Oh, you know what I mean

*Watched Happenstance (aka, Le battement d'ailes du papillon) over the week-end. A very charming movie. And now I'm convinced that any French comprehension I had is gone. All gone. Au revoir. Buh-bye.

(Of course, my English comprehension isn't all that good either. I tend to watch British films and anything with wacky dialects, e.g. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints; the most incomprehensible movie of all time, using subtitles.) Now I play a little brain game. . . the subtitles are often a bit before the dialogue, so I try to translate it back into French and see if it matches up. Every once in a while I am correct.

*The finches love nibbling at the seeds of the cosmos. They'll love the front flowerbed even more next summer. I'm sure we'll see a bit of productivity from the thistle seed that I shook out of the tablecloth...oops.

*Just a few more weeks until the Friends of the Library sale! I'm not looking for anything in particular...but there is always some treasure. And early Christmas shopping. (my best find last year? An only so slightly used copy of Robert Sabuda's Alice in Wonderland pop-up for $5. It's unusual to find a second hand pop-up book that hasn't been totally trashed, but this one was nice enough that I could give it to Martha for Christmas.)

Some have expressed dismay that the sale will lose its ambience because it will be held in the rec center rather than under the tent in West Park. I would beg to differ. The smell gets a little intense - body odors, mildewy books, the smell of grass decaying as it is trampled. And that's on a good day. Last year Fran and I went on Sunday and slogged through the mud and rotting grass to find the finds. It was hard to concentrate with that emergency pump thing belching up mud every two minutes.

*Today's last full measure of maternal devotion went into accompanying Bridget on a trip to shop for a dress to wear to weddings on the next couple of Saturdays. We overstayed our time at the Salvation Army (aka International House of Unsupervised Children); at least in my estimation. They do a delightful job of sorting clothes by color family, but the books are chucked unceremoniously on overcrowded shelves. The upside is that they don't take the time to price the books. A flat fifty cents a piece! Bridget could have stayed another hour but I had to go while I could still walk out under my own power.

Then we stopped at WalMart to exchange a shirt I bought for Eddie and to restock on Benadryl, sea salt and aspirin. I don't know why I was supposed to buy sea salt, but I went along with it since it was so delightfully packaged. Morton's fine sea salt from Spain! Then on to T. J. Maxx, where I tried to beg off and stay in the car with one of the $.50 books I found at the Army store. No such luck - but we did have fun looking around. They had little bottles of Ed Hardy brand hand sanitizer in a display at the checkout. I'll say no more.

*I've noticed the days are getting shorter. It happens every year. It's still a surprise.