Well, Chappy made a new friend today. Stella, who recently adopted Kim’s family.

We walked around town, gave some directions to lost people, and then stopped for coffee (for the humans). Chappy was feeling just a little disgruntled by then–people kept coming out of the coffee shop, asking all sorts of questions about Stella. What kind of dog is she? She’s so cute! How old is she? Can I take her picture. (Yes, really. One woman leaned out of the door of the coffee shop so she could take a picture on her cell phone.) All while they more or less ignored Chappy.

Which he just couldn’t understand. Wasn’t he just as cute? Not to mention fluffier? (Well, he is.) So he would go over to the person and wag his tail, looking all adorable. “Um, hello. I’m cute, too!” And they’d politely pet him and tell him he was cute and then go back to fawning all over Stella. It was like being out with a movie star. I think Chappy’s feeling just a little neglected–especially since Stella was ignoring him, too, when all he wanted to do was play. Poor guy. He’s not used to this kind of treatment!

That said, we had a lovely time. It was interesting, though–for the first time in my experience, being out for a walk with two dogs, they consistently stopped to sniff at completely different things. Usually, when one dog finds a good “sniff,” the other will come over to check it out, too. But not these two, they just did their own thing and mostly ignored each other during the walking portion of the outing. Kim and I got to chat, though, which was nice. We even saw one of the owners of Nonna’s yarn shop walking to her car. We even had two cars stop with people asking direction. (One we could help, the other? Um, no. And Kim, I looked it up–that other street was along Indian Lake, back behind the A&P. A section of town I’ve pretty much never really been.)

That hole in the shopping center I showed you a couple weeks ago? Here’s a close-up. They literally cut a hole in the building–roof and all–and then put up walls. Why, oh why?

This is what the rest of the shopping center looks like. There are exactly three businesses doing business in there– a Blimpies, a dry-cleaner, and a bank. Everything else–including much of the parking lot–is a construction site.

The rest of my day? Reading (Lion in the Valley by Elizabeth Peters and Knitting from the Top by Barbara Walker) and relaxing on the couch with Chappy, who’s exhausted from all that excitement.

And, oh yes, I went out to get the mail and timed it just as our mail-carrier was pulling up to the driveway. She said, “I’ve got a story to tell you.” This morning, before starting her rounds, she brought her mail truck to a local gas station to fill up the tank and have the oil checked. Well. When the person opened up the hood to check the oil … he saw something move. A full-grown raccoon, just curled up alongside the engine. Yikes! It sat up and looked at the two of them, crawled down the ground, back up into the engine … and finally headed off on its own. Sandi said that she would have happily given it the truck, that she wasn’t going to risk making it mad. So, really, we’re lucky to have gotten our mail at all today. That post office creed about ‘neither rain nor hail dark of night‘ says nothing about wildlife, you know.

Okay–I’m going to go crunch some numbers for my cardigan now. And, it just occured to me–if I want to knit the button bands as part of the sweater (which would be easier), I kind of sort of need to know what size buttons I’m going to be using, huh? So–before the number-crunching, off to the Button Drawer….

Kim, we had fun!

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