Sometimes Everything Disappears

All the locals Maya talks to agree that this has been an unusual summer here on the Pacific coast. It’s been much more cloudy than normal. For most of the time we’ve been here cloudy/overcast/foggy days have been more common than bright/clear/sunny days. Usually there is a bit of June Gloom, as Maya’s Grandpa calls it. But it seems where we are it has turned into All Summer Long Gloom. Strangely, the clouds and fog seem to hover right here in our little neck of the woods. Even going 6 miles down the coast to Trader Joe’s or inland to San Luis Obispo we find a stereotypically beautiful day. Then as we come home, the clouds close in again. This is not to say that we get no pretty days. It’s often quite nice. Just sometimes…

Something fun: We bought a new shelf. We left Louisville traveling light. We left stacks and stacks of books in storage and only brought one small bookshelf with us. It’s a folding shelf too so it collapses flat. Well, we go to World Market a lot and they have a shelf there that we have been looking at longingly for years. It’s an unusual shape. It’s like an A with four cross bars that are the shelves. They have a dark-stained one that actually matches some of the furniture we already have and then an amazing rose-stained one that matches nothing but looks so much better. We went in that other day and the shelves were on clearance- 50% off! Well, we spent a while debating the pros and cons. It went something like this: Do we need it? No. Should we get a large piece of furniture while we are traveling? Probably not. But it does fold up like out other one! True. Do we want it? Of course. Will we regret it if we don’t get it? Yes. So that was that. The display model was the last one, so we got an additional $50 off! So now we have another shelf and we had no trouble filling it up with all our stuff.

Because of the shape of the shelves we also had to get a bookend in order to keep our books up. We chose a hefty plaster koi-fish. It looks great – sitting their on the shelf, holding the books up. Someday we’ll have to find a similarly eccentric something to sit on the other side of the shelf.