Shopping Offline

For a non-driver in a smallish town, shopping online is a godsend, but it has its limitations. The basic problem is this: you can't find what you're not looking for. Some of the best books in my library were impulse buys, things my eye happened to fall on while browsing - and you can't, at least at the current level of technology, browse online.

It happens that my father lives a short distance from a Barnes & Noble. Every year, during my holiday visit, I make a raid on B&N. This year's spree was last Monday, and I made a fairly good haul. I was disappointed, though, to find that a few books I particularly wanted - the third volume of Barnes' "Thousand Cultures" series, the next Spencer-Fleming, a paperback of Paladin of Souls (for my sister E, who prefers paperback to hardbound) - weren't there. I also paused long over the Wheel of Time and Dark Tower series, before deciding I'd lost interest in both of them.

Without further ado, ( the list: )

Yesterday I also raided Sam Goody, and came away with nine CDs: ( more goodies )

Garbage Detail

My father lives in a small, quiet neighborhood, maybe a couple of dozen residences situated along a private ring road (very low-traffic, for which, as shall be seen, I am devoutly grateful). There's a manager, a communal pool, a communal dumpster, and like that.

This morning, I volunteered to take the garbage out. Dad suggested that I use his bike, pointing out that there was already a bagful of garbage in the basket. ("You do know how to ride a bike, don't you?" Yes, Dad, you were there about thirty-nine years ago, when I spent several afternoons crashing into the fence along the driveway until I got the hang of it...) He failed to mention a few things.

a) It wasn't a bike, strictly speaking, but an adult trike, which handles rather differently than a bike. In particular, the steering is a little less responsive. This was compounded by the fact that

b) The front tire was nearly flat. As a consequence,

c) The thing pulled hard to the left.

Swelp me, I drove that thing like I was drunk. I could not keep the trike on a straight line, much less the gentle rightward curve of the path to the dumpster. By the third time I nearly crashed into the left-hand curb (having gotten only halfway to the dumpster), I had attracted the attention of the manager. I managed to persuade him that I was harmless (and not, say, a trike-cum-trash thief). But I walked it the rest of the way.

Dad, by the way, was utterly unapologetic about the things he had failed to mention...