Vacation Day

The raging temper tantrum seems to have passed. Lots of wasted drama in the past 24-hours. I started to detail some of it here then erased it.  I want to move past it and rehashing it won't help.  If I had to give myself marks for how I handled the preceding day's events, I'd give myself an 85-95% passing grade.  If anything, I detract marks for the raging blog-post of yesterday. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with the way I conducted myself. 

It was mid-70's here today and Blair and I decided to escape for the day.  We got in the car about 8:30 this morning and drove to King, a tiny little North Carolina town for an egg and pancake breakfast. Then we drove into Mount Airy (home of everything Andy Griffith) and did some shopping. 

We stumbled into the cutest little store called Scarlet Begonias. It's a trendy gift store with eye-catching purses and jewelry and unique clothing and fun paintings and items for the house. I found a really cute orange travel purse and a semi-dressy drape that also looks good with jeans to wear around England (if you click on "clothing" under the "Gallery" heading, there's a montage of pictures and my orange purse is draped over a mannequin in the opening shot).

The owner was preparing for a book signing later that day and when I told her I'd written a gift book, she agreed to carry it.  Luckily, we'd driven my car that morning so I had some in the back seat. So Scarlet Begonias now carries Lessons In Stalking.  Yea!

We spent some more time exploring stores ("Opie's Candy Store," "Floyd's Barber Shop") then headed to Pilot Mountain for a 2-mile hike. The weather was glorious--it felt so good to be outside, far away from anything remotely resembling a laptop. We ended the day by swinging by and picking up groceries on our way home.

We're not as young as we used to be. The last part of our hike was straight up this very rocky terrain and we were feeling it.  And after we'd sat to drive the 30 minutes to the grocery store, both of us moaned as we exited the car.  Sore legs and buttocks. 

Blair is now collapsed on the coach watching basketball and I'm getting ready to go plop myself on the other couch with hot tea and a book.  A friend in my children writer's critique group loaned me a stash of her novels for middle-graders so I'm educating myself this week.  

Say a prayer for us that we're able to hobble our way out of bed tomorrow...

 Dena