It's a perfect summer's day at last. The sun pours over me like warmed honey on the skin. The light breeze flutters my clothes and lifts my hair off the back of my neck. Brunch at the Town's End this morning with Faunt and Paleo was suitably yummy. I had the salmon and onion omelette with fruit. Admire my restraint! I could have had the deliciously fattening potato pancakes but I was uncharacteristically conscious of caloric intake, possibly because the summer weather made me long to run about in a sundress and sandals. It has been overcast since November, you know, so the sunshine made everyone giddy. I could tell as I strolled around Union Square afterwards. Even the panhandlers seemed mellow.
At the Rizzoli bookshop I discovered the book I desperately want, Great Houses of England and Wales, is no longer in stock. I passed up buying a copy I found last week at Borders because I didn't want to patronize the establishment; I assumed I could buy it elsewhere, and now I find even the publisher doesn't carry it. Argh. This business of being politically correct has its downsides (I'm wholly on the side of the independent booksellers and support them exclusively). I consoled myself with a tiny book on shoes which informed me that the average American woman owns 30 pairs of shoes. Ha! I have 50 pairs, which some people give me a hard time about, calling it a huge collection. As you can see, it's simply a little above average.
For a while I mooched around Sutter Street, trying to find a couple of stores I remembered from years ago, but they were gone. I worked my way through the crowds listening to a very good surf band to get to the Sanrio store. Inside was almost as crowded. I wandered happily among the insanely cheerful and deliriously cute merchandise looking for a new floppy disk box. I have a Pekkle box, and I needed a second one so I got a Pochacco ("He's the Uki Uki dog!") box. Now I'm home, my disks are organized, and my urge to squander huge sums of money has been allayed by the acquisition of a book and a plastic box from Japan. Time to play some Grateful Dead really loud and sit in the sunshine watching the cats play in the garden.
