Anytime

Gainesville

All over but the shouting, that is, another truckload of stuff to bring home, some clean-up to do on my computer. Sunday morning for that. Also a few last bits of paperwork didn't get done. despite my efforts.

Yesterday I spent nearly three hours walking my legs off on a very hot day in a great circle around campus; only got one of the three errands done. Will try to do one of them by mail; the other one is not urgent (bringing in marriage license in order to change my name on a savings account).

We didn't take Blue in to work yesterday because Bill was in a hurry and didn't want to take time to switch the parking gizmos. When we got home, there were the 17 boxes of books from Beckley, as promised, piled up in the carport. Oh me oh my. Bill brought them in this morning, a small mountain in the Great Room (looking less Great all the time).

We were both more than ready for our Thursday night visit to Mel. She was all a-twitter, in the afterglow of last week's wonderful Tom Petty concert, but also because Bill had sent a glowing letter to Outback corporate praising this particular outlet for the amazing private party the manager had for us Regulars last month, but also for the general goodness of the place, and mentioning Mel and her crew in particular. This rippled back down to the manager, and put a few more stars in Mel's crown.

Today we did take Blue in. I wore jeans and worked like a stevadore all day, loading my borrowed book truck and trekking it down the elevator in the north tower, along the looooong east-west arcade, to the Systems loading dock area in the south tower. Sometimes I had to heave my entire weight against it to get the thing moving, especially over carpet, but I got it done. All except the last load of the six, which Bill pushed for me. We loaded Blue's bed with all the boxes and the posters, and the misc stuff (clothes, food, survival gear, etc.). This leaves just the unboxed books.

Systems is empty right now, as they've been installing new carpet for the past six weeks or so. Very handy, as there are miles of empty book shelves, some of which are housing the Covey Collection-- overflow from when I still lived in the little house on NW 11th St. -- all my music books and scores, science, philosophy, language, social sciences, library science. Plus all the various computer-related crap I've acquired meantime. All unboxed. I'm so sick of putting books into boxes, taking them out, over and over, just decided this time I'll just toss them in the truck bed, then put them in heaps on the floor along with the rest of the books. Probably the best thing to do would be just put compact storage in that big room at home and give up on having it be a big, gracious space. It was always just a silly pipedream.

Nice lunch with Systems people at a little Vietnamese place within walking distance. Not a nice walk, though, as it traverses University and 13th St, and it's still quite hot here. They had to have fans on in the room we were in. The sound system was playing a weird assortment of classical music: Schubert's Ave Maria, followed by the Bach/Gounod version, and on from there. No one but me knew what they were hearing.

Grrrr. The barmaid (me) just made a big mistake-- pouring a perfectly good drink down the drain because she thought she'd messed it up-- only to realize, too late, that she had done it right in the first place. The perils of being a barmaid who serves herself at the end of a very long week.

Sandy, I'd never heard of "Sweep Steak," although I knew about the oven pot roast recipe because it is among the print-outs of Mom's recipes, which I treasure. I've made it a number of times, always to good result.

Need to try and wind down now. The game tomorrow starts at 3:30. Bill asked me what time I was planning to shop, so as to avoid the game, knowing that Sunday morning was spoken for, and afternoon was football and ".... wait a minute. You can shop anytime!"

Oh, yeah.