Book completed

Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch. Fifth in the Rivers of London series, and my favorite so far. I loved it! Peter helps solve a mystery in rural Herefordshire, and one aspect that was especially fun for me was that the trees their forest service was planting for timber were foreign trees from the Pacific Northwest: douglas-fir and western hemlock. And when I was a child and we'd drive from the coast through the forest to the valley in late spring, there would always be foxgloves growing along the railroad tracks by the roadside.

This one was so much fun that I'm going to buy my own copy for sure, and reread it. (I had an e-copy from the library.)

Day 278: Errands, errands

I'm pretty sure whatever's making me feel sick involves my inner ear - my energy level is fine and I discovered today that if I rested between activities I could keep doing more and more. So I did.

First I got the two packages mailed to Chapel Hill. The line in the post office was super-long, naturally, since people were trying to stay six feet apart. I decided the line for the counter was a good gamble, even though the line for the machine was much shorter, partly because the people waiting for the machine were standing closer together than seemed best. There were three clerks, and the middle clerk spent almost the whole time I was there helping just one customer, which often happens this time of year - people running small businesses often have to ship a lot in December. My best guess for this particular business, based on the packages and the customer, was t-shirts and sweatshirts with marijuana themes, ha. Anyway, I was right, even with one clerk tied up, the other two kept the line moving pretty well, and although there were at least 15 people ahead of me, I was done within 20 minutes, and if I'd been in the other line I wouldn't have even started the laborious process with the machine by then. I told my clerk (a Russian? immigrant named Natasha) that I was impressed with how quickly the line was moving, and her face completely lit up - it was obvious even with her mask. Other customers were praising them too, and people were generally cheerful.

After resting a bit, I drove to the library downtown (not much strain on my sense of balance because it's pretty much a straight line from here to there). I turned in three books and got three they had for me. They also had a new feature - grab bags where they've collected things with a theme (e.g., romance novels for teens, CDs of Christmas music, dragon books for children age 10-14), and you can check them all out together. Good idea! On the way home I stopped at Market of Choice and got bread and stocking treats and such.

Then I rested more, including reading that book I liked so much (I wish I had more of it to read now), then I went to Pegasus to pick up a pizza for dinner. My pizza and I arrived at J's house just in time for this week's streamed movie, Die Hard, which had won the vote over three other Christmas movies.

Later, after it was done, D. called from his girlfriend's house to ask if I could pick him up and take him for more driving practice, so we did that. We focused on making turns. That late in the evening, there are very few cars around our neighborhood, so it went quite smoothly. A deer browsing on the grass beside the school parking lot stood and stared at us for at least 10 minutes - I was cracking up. After D. was more proficient with turns, I had him drive around the neighborhood a bit and eventually back to our house. I think he feels pretty good about it. Next time I think I'll have him practice all that some more and work on developing a sense of the width of the car.