Goodbye, Summer

It's been quite a week. A good week. A busy week. A week fitting for the last week of summer. Monday was grocery shopping, for groceries I don't think I touched all week. It wasn't a good week for home cooked meals. Tuesday was packed with a client meeting then movie night; Los and I grabbed a much-need beer and some chips before seeing Tropic Thunder, which was a lot funnier than I thought it would be, and thus was one of those movies that made me feel just a little guilty that I wasn't watching it with Matt.

Thursday, we got to go to the Ravens game. Neither my boss nor her friend were using their season tickets, so Matt, Court, VJ and I watched the Ravens get spanked by the Falcons. Matt Stover was the highlight of the game; especially watching him try to tackle a running back. We girls were thinking both "YAY, MATT!" and "Please don't hurt Matt Stover!"

This week also marked the end of "summer hours" at work, where we got off at 3:30. I got out of there around 4pm and Matt drove us down to get my mom, who spent her birthday-weekend with us. On the way, we stopped at an antique shop, where I wandered around wide-eyed and reverent, running my fingers across treasured items once belonging to strangers. There were a lot of things I may have liked to have purchased, but settled on an old costume jewelry necklace and two books, a collection of short stories from 1939 and a 1927 edition of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

After collecting Mom and her things, we headed homeward, stopping at Noodles & Co. near our house for some dinner. (We intended to go to P.F. Chang's, but it was packed with adventurous suburbanites.) Either way, I was grateful for a good meal with some veggies, and it filled Mom's need for someone to place food in front of her. (She has little of my restaurant snobbery, but insists that she be served her food if going through the trouble and expense of going out, making places like Panera less favored.)

Saturday, Matt made a lovely (if not slightly late) breakfast of pancakes and scrambled eggs, then cleaned and did laundry while Mom and I wandered from store to store. At Michael's, she got some silk flowers; at Target, I bought cleaning supplies and yet another magazine; at Barnes & Noble, I bought Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver (I've already read the first essay, but will post about that later); at A.C. Moore, I contemplated -- but did not purchase -- sock yarn. We saw Mama Mia, which was sugary-sweet but surprisingly good, and left us both with ABBA songs stuck firmly in our heads. We popped into a funiture store and Hallmark, then met Matt and Don Pablo's for dinner. Mom got her fill of her favorite cheesy-good Mexican (-ish) food, we had a sweetheart of a waiter, and Mom got to wear the big black sombrero and have a restaurant full of people scream "Happy Birthday" to her.

After dinner, we wandered around Pier 1 a bit to digest, then further stuffed ourselves with Cold Stone Creamery. By the time we went to bed, we were fat and happy.


Sunday, we went to Crepe du Jour for brunch. I love Mount Washington in general and Crepe du Jour in particular. We sat outside, and I felt very French. After Matt, Mom and I stuffed ourselves with a steak, crepe and omlette respectively, we went to Hamden (hon). We stopped in Lovelyarns, where I let Mom pick out a lovely sock yarn (so I now need to learn to knit socks) and I bought a set of huge (size 35) wooden needles, and a skein of a mohair/nylon/wool blend, with which I'm thinking of knitting armwarmers for use in my office.


We also stopped into Salamander Books, where I purchased a copy of The God of Small Things and Julie & Julia, which I'm already sixty-some pages into. From Hamden, we dropped Mom off and headed back home, with me reading along the way, and enjoying the clutter of packages I made on the passenger-side floorboard of Matt's car.
And now that I'm home, I'm off to enjoy my new stack of books!