Week 43

I've been playing with e-book readers, lately, of the Kindle and Sony ilk. I have loaded books on them and browsed around. I've also read e-books on a computer monitor. But I have never really read an entire book on an e-book reader.

My local public library just made a number of books available in the epub format, which allows you to download a book; it then goes away after three weeks so you can't keep it forever. Darien has been listening to "A Tale of Two Cities" and loving it, and Antonia says it is one of her favorite books, so I decided to try reading it on a loaner machine I have from work. I've read almost everything of Dickens, but never this one for some reason, even though it has one of the most well-known first paragraphs in history. After a bit of fumbling understanding how to load it, I got it working last night and read two chapters. It works fine, although I wish the contrast were higher. My biggest problem so far is automatically reaching up to flip the page when I should be pressing a button.

Real conversation on Friday night in the car on the way home:

HER: My goal for this weekend is to clean the counter off.
HIM: Oh?
HER: Yes.
HIM: I don't believe you.
HER: It's true.
HIM: I only worry that we will lose a bill in there. I found one last week.
HER: I'm going to do it tomorrow.
HIM: OK.

Week 42

Speckled Bird took wing last night at the Camel. We were up in the mountains with Peter and the Harrises, doing our version of JMU Family Weekend. It was a nice weekend, even though it was cold and rainy. We even saw a few snowflakes while we were hiking the ridge. The main event was eating, however. Darien typically brings too much food on these things, but Kandy outdoes her without breaking a sweat. Maybe she thinks we are going to get snowed in for a week or something. I'm not complaining. Between the two of them we had crackers, cheeses, hard salami, olives, lamb, pilaf, green beans, bread, salad, popcorn (on the cob, the way God intended it, Kim informing us that it is the higher water content in some corn that causes the pop as the water reaches a boiling point under extreme hit), apple crisp and vanilla ice cream, coffee, bacon, baby sausages, scrambled eggs with onions and cheese and basil, lemon muffins (tell Darien to put this one in Duke Dip), apple cider squeezed on the spot from the apples we picked up at Carter's Orchard on the way out, more Carter apples, cold fried chicken, dark espresso chocolate, three types of lunch meat for sandwiches, thick homemade vegetable and beer soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, peanuts, and candy corn. I'm probably missing some things. That was just until 6 p.m. on Saturday when Darien and I had to leave. Kandy was at that point making double recipe of lasagna so the boys could bring some home, along with another dish that Josh had requested and I don't know what all else. They were there for Sunday as well, so I'm sure the cooking didn't stop when we left.

As I said, we had to leave the food and drive to Richmond. The GPS told me that it would take me 2 hours and 24 minutes to get there. I only had two hours to be there by the 8 p.m. opening, or Antonia would scowl. I made it in just two hours, but it really didn't matter since they didn't start on time anyway. The crowd in Camel was probably exceeding whatever the fire marshal considered its capacity. They played two sets, with Josh and Chris doing lead vocals on a number of songs before they turned things over to the regular Bird and played their entire EP all the way through. It was fun, and earned them an encore. I'll probably to the next one too, but I won't be able to write about it here, since it will no longer be a new experience for me.

The counter probably didn't get cleaned because we were gone for 24 hours. I'm sure that is the reason.

Week 41

I am not the most aggressive consumer in the world. Maybe I just avoid conflict, but after a certain point in the consumer-commercial relationship I accept the situation and turn my attention elsewhere. Not Darien. She is the junkyard dog of consumers. If she thinks she has a case, she is going to nip you to death over it.

This is why we just received our fourth espresso machine from Starbucks. (Can I say that name here?) It is not like we received defective products and had to keep returning them. This has been going on for years. It is the best machine we have ever owned. Combined with our burr grinder and mail order coffee from Porto Rico in New York (can I say that name here?) it makes an excellent espresso. We use ours at least twice a day, often four or five, and if we have visitors even more. Maybe that is the problem, since they seem to fail right before they hit the end of their two-year warranty life. Darien, God bless her, gets on Starbucks's case and pesters them until they send us a new one. The last one even had passed its warranty by five weeks or so and she still convinced them to send us a new one. They told her this is the last time they are going to send us a replacement. I think they say that just because they aren't manufactured anymore.

I don't know if Starbucks is the most service-oriented company in the world, or if in marrying Darien I latched on to the most aggressive consumer advocate walking the planet. I suspect the latter. (Can I say that name here?)

We need to talk.

Week 40

I spent part of Saturday with the dust and mosquitoes in the shadows of Cox's salvage yard, looking for a door with a frosted glass pane. We saw lots of doors, and several possibilities. All in all, we thought it was a productive several hours, so we rewarded ourselves on the way home with a stop at Cafe Gutenberg. Darien order an espresso and I ordered a coffee. We decided to split a sandwich of scrambled eggs and oyster mushrooms on panini bread with a side of fries.

While we were waiting, I pulled out a book I was ready to start reading, Murder in the Marais by Cara Black. It is not the sort of thing I usually read, but Darien says I have to read the entire series because each novel is set in a different area of Paris, and we are planning on going to France next summer. I figured reading schlocky mysteries was easier than, say, actually learning to speak French, so I'm going along with the plan. I was taken aback to read in the first paragraph of the first page:

The man emerged from the shadows by her frosted paned office door.

I don't know if this is a premonition I am going to buy the door we looked at, go to France, or become involved in a murder. Maybe all three. ("Returning to my hotel room in Paris, I discovered the frosted paned door had been used as a blunt instrument, striking dead the concierage ...")

Things are definitely deteriorating, but I'm not sure I want to complain too loudly. I had a week's worth of excellent apple juice from that machine.