Just got back from. . .

. . .a sweat producing walk with Lucy.  Lucy loves a walk, gets very excited before we start, and is very determined as to where we are going to go.  She also likes to stop and sniff every mailbox post.  Occasionally she also slams us to a stop so her nose can examine some particularly disgusting item.  Lucy's problem is that she usually goes too far in the direction away from home, so that when I finally get her to start back, the return trip is daunting for her furry frame.  Thank you to the Durfee's of Post Lane, who offered her a drink as we trudged up the final rise before home, but it was easier not to stop, and soon we were back, and Lucy was drinking from her favorite toilet before tumbling to the cool kitchen floor.

This sweaty walk was good for me as it cleared my head. I had tried to do some proofreading earlier in the afternoon and had been struck by the two-days-after-you-got-rejected-my-stuff-sucks-and-who-would-ever-want-to-read-it blues.  I had to stop working before I decided to delete a couple of hundred hours of work just because I was in a pissy mood.

Amanda Horning (LA), the once and future Stacy Foxx, stopped over yesterday.  She and Wendy (Phoenix) are in from the left coast to go to a wedding in Joisey.  It was great to see her.  She looks terrific, but we didn't get to talk for very long, and she told absolutely no juicy Bonnie Hunt stories.

Hamilton was today's site for a mother-in-law and sister-in-law excursion.  It's a great place to visit for a few hours.  We started at the farmer's market in the park, went to lunch at Nichols and Beals (I think that's right) and ended up at the Colgate Bookstore, which is in the center of the village.  If you love bookstores, and haven't been to this one, then go.  I purchased a new literary classic called PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES.  It's a novel about Jane Austen's world if it also happened to be inhabited by the brain-eating, walking dead. The first sentence of the original PRIDE AND PREJUDICE reads, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."  The first sentence of P and P and Z reads, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."  The catch phrase for the book is "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read."  This is more than Mark Twain ever dreamed of when he said of Jane Austen, "It's a shame she died a natural death."