persimmonfrost | It's been quite a weekend

A long one. Jose came by on Saturday morning to fix the pipes, and he was here for almost three hours. Bad clog. And the pipes under the sink are in bad shape and leaking, so he's coming back some time this week to replace them. I should have let him do it on Saturday but as it was

purpmaro 's birthday and since we wanted to get to Bob Chinn's early to beat the crowds, I asked if it couldn't wait, which it could. So we had a lovely rest of the afternoon with

purpmaro and

judymoe , and then a wonderful supper, with service that was so far above what we'd suffered the weekend before at Hema's Kitchen that I left feeling a whole lot better about dining out in general. Of course we'd all been watching the Pythonathon, and so spent a lot of time throwing quotes back and forth at each other, one of the most popular being "You find that wisible?" every time someone laughed. The mai-tais were to blame. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. Afterward we watched "Reefer Madness, the Musical" which was very funny, and ate brownies that Glinda made.

Today Jim came by to have brunch at The Gale Street Inn with us. They have a Big Easy brunch which is very nice, and again, the service was excellent. We had a very leisurely brunch of breakfast and luncheon foods, and a mimosa. Really enjoyable.

After that we loaded up Jim's car with bags of clothing and shoes that I wanted to donate to Salvation Army, but we found them closed, which was odd. I left the shoes outside the door, but didn't feel like leaving all that clothing. Since we had to go to the bank and Target, we drove up Harlem a way, and found a drop box for Helping Hands, and I gave them the clothing. I'd never given them any support before, and they do good work, so I was happy about the way it all turned out. The box happened to be in a mall where Oak Mill Bakery had a shop so we decided to go on in, and ended up getting a pumpkin pie and an apricot, plum and cheese kuchen. Then Jim noticed a store next door and said he'd like to check it out, so we said "Hey sure, why not?" Turned out to have been a great choice. The store is called DOM Itp and it's a Polish import store with great prices on a lot of lovely things. I bought a couple of beautiful Christmas ornaments. Those of you who remember the great flood of a few years ago may also remember that I lost most of my old ornaments in the deluge. Apart from the sentimental value, I didn't much care since I haven't felt very Christmasy in a long time. But this year I'd started thinking about getting a tree again, and it was as if the beautiful and very reasonably priced ornaments were a sign from the universe that it was time. I also got a small gold cone tree, and a Christmas table runner. I'm totally taken with one of their glassware lines and long to buy a set of wine glasses. I'm sure we'll be going back.

Finally we went up to a garden center up on Touhy, near Central, and bought four pumpkins, half a doz pots of mums and a couple of ornamental kale plants. Then we came back here and finished the Halloween decorating. I have got to tell you, I think our house is just the best on the block!