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Beautiful days

The roller girl restored, at the Dream Roller Rink, on Chincoteague Rd, New Church, Virginia

(Okay, that picture's a couple weeks old, but that was a beautiful day too.)

We are getting one last reprieve from the summer heat. Saturday was cool, cloudy with drizzle. I hope the weather was clearer in Kentucky, where they took Queen Elizabeth II for the Kentucky Derby rather than keeping her here for the NASCAR races in Richmond.

Even with the rain, Sparky insisted on going outside to nibble on the grass and muddy his paws. I hung out with him, nibbling on spearmint leaves (as close as I got to a mint julep). From now till October, the sun is too strong for me to spend many midday hours outside, but in the drizzle I am safe from the sun. We need to consider moving north.

Still, we didn't work in the yard. We ran errands: kitty litter, toilet paper, laundry detergent. We went to the bookstore and got fluff to read. Not all of the fluff made it into the bag at the store! We found a book missing when we unloaded our catch at home. Naturally it was the trashiest looking book of a very trashy lot. We went back to the bookstore today to ask for a copy of the book we bought. Oz pointed out that the worst part of the process was having to admit to picking that trashy book. Twice.

But the sympathetic clerk I spoke with only said, "Oh, no! That always happens to me at the grocery store." The bookstore has a system for dealing with this situation. They bag and tag all the books this happens to, and keep them behind the counter. My book was at the top of a very large pile, not one day's worth, I hope. You'd think getting the books into the bags would be the easy part of the job.

Somehow over the course of the errands and other activities, Oz started rhapsodizing about chicken gizzards and the rhapsody turned into a quest for gizzards and gizzard stew. The market didn't have gizzards for sale, but they did have chicken livers and other chicken parts. Oz spent this afternoon dismembering vegetables and chicken organs and made a chicken liver stew, quite tasty, if you like liver. After I don't know how many bowls, Oz declared, "I am a soup genius."

I have a hunch that Gizzard Quest 2007 will continue.