Teddy Bear's Picnic

Today was much like most Wednesdays except for the fact that we are having a mini heat wave and, it could almost be predicted, the air conditioner isn't working. We don't turn it on very often and even then not until the end of the day. Yesterday we had both been outside during the heat of the day and didn't realize how hot we were until we came inside and agreed that it was time. Even Ozzie was hot and he wouldn't dream of going outside when it was 93 degrees. Alas, it made the appropriate noises, but the air conditioner was not producing noticeably cooler air. They are coming tomorrow to fix it, but by then it is supposed to start cooling off anyway...

We had a furnace in Berkeley that always refused to turn on when we had our first really cold day of the year.

I went down to Flying Goat as usual this morning after Pilates,, but instead of an Aztek Mocha, I had an iced one and my friend Nancy had an iced latte. We sat outside next to the railroad tracks where, apparently in anticipation of an official opening of the SMART train soon, they were testing it by driving by, horn blaring, stopping at the platform, driving on to the next intersection a block away, horn blaring and backing up and repeating the whole process...over and over.

The SMART Board has overruled the adjacent communities' requests for 'quiet zones' claiming safety reasons. How does hearing the train on a track four miles away make it safer? I think the SMART board may not be that SMART.

Nancy and I decamped and I went into the antique collective up the street just because I get such a kick out of all the junk stuff treasures in there...everything from old cast iron pots, to baseball card collections (is the bubblegum still in those unopened packages from 1938?) to the rather worse for wear looking teddy bears in my picture today. Some of them were so well loved that it was difficult to ascertain what species they were. It was even more difficult to ascertain why anybody would pay $85 for the creature in the thumbnail.

I ran into a man there who repairs old clocks and offered to take my grandmother's clock, clean it and bring it to the house and install it on its designated shelf when I told him that traveling was what seemed to do it in. 

I may just take him up on it.